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The Latest News
on Power and Evil
in Washington
(and Elsewhere)
PUBLISHED
ON AUGUST 1
THE TRUTH ABOUT
DICK CHENEY:
He's Dumb
SPECIAL PRE-LA
REPORT ON AL GORE:
° Soul Brother to Newt
° Betrayer the Environment
° Friend of Nuclear Power
° Hated by Senate Colleagues
° New Deal Sabotuer
° Reinventing Government
on the Backs of the Poor
PUBLISHED
ON JULY 10
GORE'S PLATFORM:
More Cops, More Prisons,
More Breaks for Big Oil
THE PENTAGON ON
INTERNET PATROL:
Meet ACERT
FUNGUS ON COLOMBIA:
New York Times Takes a Dive
MEAT IN AMERICA:
Veggies Blitz Batgirl
PUBLISHED
ON JUNE 15
IN THE STEPS OF
AGENT BLUE:
McCaffery's Biowar on Drugs
REMEMBER CHICAGO 68!:
Cops Plan Their
Convention Riots
SUPREME COURT SCARE
STUDENT TRASHES
ALBRIGHT AT
BERKELEY GRADUATION
Search CounterPunch
Whiteout:
the CIA, drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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August 8, 2000
Gore, Lieberman,
and Revenge
of the Press Prudes
Now it's the turn of
Al Gore and Joe Lieberman to be flattered by the same moist-eyed
press corps that's been hailing the stultifying Republican convention
in Philadelphia as a masterpiece of political stagecraft. Gore
is being congratulated for pre-empting popular anger at the moral
turpitude of the Clinton years. Yes, this is the same press that
told us for an entire year that the American people were so furious
at Bill Clinton for his conduct towards Monica Lewinsky that
they wanted him to step down. Of course, poll after poll showed
the American people rallying to Bill Clinton's side.
We write on the morning
after the announcement of Gore's pick. Mostly it's a day of shame
for journalism. Column upon column of newsprint hails Gore's
acumen in undercutting the supposed "moral edge" in
public esteem now held by the Republicans. Beyond anecdotal assessment
no evidence for this edge is advanced. Column upon column dwells
upon Lieberman's powers of ethical discrimination, symbolized
by his observance of the Sabbath and his criticisms of Bill Clinton.
It's certainly proper
to exult in a decline in prejudice at least to the point that
Gore's pollsters have advised the notoriously cautious vice president
that it is a reasonable bet to pick a Jew as his running mate.
But is the public not also entitled to learn something about
Lieberman the Democratic politician?
In 1988 incumbent Senator
Lowell Weicker, a maverick liberal Republican, was up for reelection,
and his Democratic challenger was State Attorney General Joe
Lieberman. Lieberman ran against Weicker from the right. Conservative
guru William F. Buckley (a Connecticut resident) endorsed Lieberman
and stumped to get out the right-wing vote for him. So did most
of the Republicans in the Connecticut legislature. One telling
moment of the campaign was a televised debate, in which Lieberman
attacked Weicker for the latter's support for lifting the embargo
and reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba. Lieberman said
to Weicker, "You're closer to Fidel Castro than you are
to Ronald Reagan." With the Reaganite vote and the votes
of most Democrats, Lieberman easily won the election.
Connecticut is well
known for its hospitality to the insurance, aerospace, and arms
industries. Few press accounts have evoked Lieberman's obsequiousness
to these corporate powers that underwrite his campaigns. The
insurance industry didn't like the Clinton health plan of 1993
and neither did Lieberman. The insurance industry wanted limits
set on damages in product liability suits. Lieberman was one
of only four Democratic senators to agree.
Potent in the political
economy of Connecticut are Pratt & Whitney, United Technologies
and Sikorsky. Senator Lieberman has duly been a mighty promoter
of the Black Hawk helicopter, the Comanche, the Joint Strike
Fighter, the F-22, the C-17 transport and the nuclear subs necessary
to beat off the armadas of North Korea. He's similarly been a
fierce supporter of NATO expansion in eastern Europe, meaning
that Poland, Hungary and Czechslovakia have to buy arms from
these same corporations, with Uncle Sam guaranteeing the tab.
This record will presumably
increase the appeal of Ralph Nader's independent candidacy to
progressives, but even this political consequence has not been
regarded as pertinent by most of our colleagues in the corporate
press, who are now preparing to fly west to Los Angeles and prepare
the public for the traditional "speech of his life"
from Al Gore.
There hasn't actually
been a decent speech by a presidential candidate at a major convention
since William Jennings Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold finale
to the Democrats in 1896. Given the hokum level endemic to our
political process, how could there be? But that doesn't impede
the "hit-it-out-of-the-park" ritual deployed in the
press every four years. Pundits who lauded Dole as Demosthenes
in 1996 have been describing George W's Bush's address in Philadelphia
as one of the best crafted homilies in the annals of human communication.
Where CounterPunch remembers someone closely resembling a tailor's
dummy squinting tensely into the cameras and babbling phrases
that would have embarassed a high school debating team, they
hailed a statesman with the political dignity of Charlemagne
and the warmth of Danny Kaye. Next it will be Al Gore's turn,
and it's a fair bet he will be congratulated for "hitting
it out of the park".
The Republicans are actually being praised for their repulsively
patronizing "black night" in Philadelphia. If they
have any sense the Democrats will turn the tables and present
their party as the true home of white suburban couples earning
more than $200,000 a year and the Republican Party as the sanctuary
of the "special interests", aka welfare mothers and
hip hop artists. Maybe that's the meaning of the Lieberman pick,
unless it's a cynical effort to rally anti-Semites into the polling
booths to vote for Pat Buchanan, thus undercutting the Bush vote.
Al Gore's October Surprise
Maybe this is another
round in the Jewish lobby's ongoing feud with the Bush family.
One of President George Bush's few courageous initiatives in
foreign policy was the withholding of $10 billion in US loan
guarantees in order to induce the obdurate Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir, of the Likud Party, into parleys on the matter of Palestinian
rights. Then, as as pro-Israeli lobbyists fanned out across Capitol
Hill, Bush famously remarked in a press conference, "Who
am I, one lonely guy against a thousand lobbyists?"
His sharp little crack
was never forgotten, least of all by Al Gore, In May of 2000
the vice president addressed AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobbying
outfit, in these terms: "I stood against the efforts of
two previous administrations to pressure Israel to take stands
against its own view of what was in Israel's best interest. When
a friend's survival is potentially at stake, you don't pressure
that friend to take steps that it believes are clearly contrary
to what is in that friend's best interest." Gore then lashed
out directly at Bush.
"I vividly remember
standing up against a group of Bush Administration foreign policy
advisers who promoted the insulting concept of linkage, which
tried to use loan guarantees as a stick to bully Israel",
Gore intoned. "I stood with you, and together we defeated
them." The outline of a Gore-organized October Surprise
is coming into view. Al Gore has always worked by simple recipes.
Back in 1992 his assigned task was to undercut President Bush's
status as the Hammer of Saddam by denouncing the US arming of
Saddam in the mid and late 1980, also the failure to finish Saddam
off at the end of the war.
In June of Campaign 2000, Gore publicly distanced himself from
President Clinton on Iraq policy, reiterating that Saddam has
to fall, and pledging support to an exile group called the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi. In the late 1990s
Chalabi's cause was pressed by Republicans in Congress, most
notably Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, and by that baleful schemer
and hero of Israel's ultra-rejectionists, Richard Perle.
A bizarre alliance, stretching from Helms to Perle and The
New Republic to Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens,
pressed Chalabi's call for the US to guarantee "military
exclusion zones" in northern Iraq and in the south near
Basra and the oil fields, to be administered by the Iraqi National
Congress. In 1998, Clinton reluctantly authorized an appropriation
of $97 million from the Pentagon budget to go to Chalabi's group.
But as a consequence of a fierce CIA attack on Chalabi's credentials
and prowess, only $84,000 was actually released, and that merely
to pay for offices and some training in public relations.
So Gore's stance on
the INC in early summer 2000 was clearly preemptive groundwork
for a fall campaign indicting the Bush family, along with Bush's
Defense Secretary Cheney, for being soft on Saddam and ratcheting
up the possibility of another military strike against Iraq. Gore
announced that he had differed with Clinton's refusal to release
$97 million in military aid to the Iraqi opposition. These posturings
remain precisely that, for the simple reason that any serious
plan for full-scale war to topple Saddam would involve (a) the
cooperation of Saudi Arabia, and (b) a warm-up of relations with
Iran, neither of which contingencies are in the least likely.
CP
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