Al
Gore:
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by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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CounterPunch
Coverage of Election 2000:
Al
Gore's Most Toxic Lie
A Letter to Gloria Steinem
Slimeball Politics
Get Nader!
Democrats Carpetbomb
Idealists and Young Folk
Sen. Rod Grams'
Demon Seed
A Vote For Nader Is...
Will a CIA Hatchetman Be Elected to Congress?
The Real Threat is Gore
Not Ralph Nader
Published on Nov. 1
THE PAY-OFF
The Nader/Green Surge
Has Given Many Young Folk a Taste for the Excitement of Radical
Organizing. People Carry Such Hours and Days with Them for the
Rest of Their Lives
JIM CROW AT
EPA
Carol Browner Heads Up
a Racist Sinkhole
JESSE VENTURA
Fun Guy, But
What's He Done?
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Studs Terkel
Describes a Dinner
With Churchill
Gen. Wesley Clark
and His '67 Mustang
Published on Oct. 15
The Final Stretch:
Caught in the
Headlights:
Gore Freezes as
Doubletalk Catches
Up With Him
NOW's Sad Descent From
Feminist Rallying
Point to Democratic Party Shill
The Nation,
In These Times
Rally Round
the Flag
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Read All About Al Gore:
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Finally Back in Print!
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November 14, 2000
Voting
Without Tears:
How To Hold Your
Nose Without Spoiling
Your Ballot Paper
See what happens when they say "Hold your
nose and vote for Al Gore". Those elderly Jews in Palm Beach
county tried to do just that. It's tough to read a ballot paper
properly when you're trying to squint round the side of your
hand. Try it yourself. There used to be federal guidelines put
out by the Justice Department in precisely the right way to grip
your nose and still see straight, but ironically Al Gore did
away with the regs as part of his Reinventing Government drive
back in '94.
"Public happiness,"
Hannah Arendt once wrote, "is not isolating, but shared.
It is the happiness if being free among other free people, of
having one's public faith redeemed and returned." Never
have we known such intense public happiness at what's happening
in Florida. Walk down the street and you hear "Gore"
or "Bush" or "Florida" on every gleeful lip.
Now that the supposedly democratic "mandate" is being
reduced to farce Americans are having their instinctive lack
of faith in the political process rousingly vindicated. Everyone
knows that what's true of Palm Beach county - incompetent
technology, human frailty, wilful obstruction of inconvenient
voters is true of at least half the counties across the
United States.
Take the case of
felons who have served time, probation and parole. 525,000 Floridians
were den ied their vote on November 7 bec ause of felony convictions
in their past, maybe passing a bad check 30 years ago. In the
last 25 years, the number of ex-felons disenfranchised has increased
from 1 percent to almost 5 percent of Florida's voting-age population.
At least 139,000 black ex-felons--9 percent of Florida's blacks
of voting-age were denied a vote.
The theoretical
purpose of the ballot box is to register the choice of the voters.
The actual purpose, unless the count is sufficiently lopsided
to banish all uncertainty, turns out to be a jimmying of the
count to match the exit polls being called by CNN and the network,
or to consort with the wishes of whatever political machine happens
to be in charge. When asked some years ago why his country has
so many statutes, Ireland's minister of justice once replied,
"Our laws are mainly for guidance." It's the same with
American electoral procedures. In the Florida courtroom of federal
judge Middlebrook a counsel for George W. Bush acknowledged a
built-in error rate for voting machines of anywhere from 2 to
5 per cent. Since the opinion polls regularly concede an error
margin in their estimates of anywhere from 4 per cent to 6 per
cent, this means that the more reputable polls may well be more
reliable registers of the people's choice than the machines that
supposedly record the people's conclusive judgement.
The Joys of Vote
Fraud
Gazing at the assorted
spokespersons for Gore and Bush we can exult in the tradition
of vote fraud that ennobles America's political history. Here
was William Daley, chairman of Al Gore's campaign, son of Mayor
Richard Daley who helped fix the Cook county vote in Illinois
in 1960, an important ingredient in the drive to put Jack Kennedy
over the top, even as Richard Nixon's men in southern Illinois
toiled manfully to fix the vote the other way. Here too was James
Baker, scion of the Texas oil industry that benefitted so hugely
from Lyndon Johnson's first stolen senatorial election.
Many an American
success story stems from vote fraud. Take LBJ and Abe Fortas,
put on the US Supreme Court by LBJ and then forced off it. In
1948 LBJ had "won" by 87 votes out of 90,000, with
some precincts showing a heroic vote of 2000 above those registered.
LBJ and his advisers feared a lawsuit and planned a strategy
of delay, seeking changes of venue and so forth, maybe even a
re-vote. Then up spoke a young lawyer, Abe Fortas.Leave the case
in the unfavorable courtroom, he counselled. Lose. Then immediately
appeal it up to the US Supreme Court, at which point Justice
Black would intervene and rule in LBJ's favor. Fortas rightly
calculated that Black would be scared of the booming power of
Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats in 1948 and would want to see the
former New Dealer (by '48 LBJ had swung sharply to the right)
keep his seat. Both LBJ and Fortas duly prospered.
Take Cook county. The treasurer of the Cook County Democratic
Party in 1960 when JFK needed votes in Chicago to put him over
was a (Kentucky) colonel called Henry Crown, also the head of
Chicago Sand and Gravel, regarded by knowledgeable observers
as Mob-controlled. Crown, the money behind Daley, helped deliver
dead Democrats in Cook County. The following year Crown bought
roughly $300 millions worth of General Dynamics' debentures,
only to have the mortification of seeing General Dynamics rack
up a huge loss, due to the collapse of its Convair 770 and 880
airliner program started by GD with the hopes of getting into
the civil aviation market.
Just about that
fraught time, the US Air Force was completing source selection
for a tri-service fighter project. The selection panel opted
for Boeing's proposal and this recommendation was sent up to
the Secretary of the Air force and Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara. At this point Henry Crown decided to call in his chips.
He contacted Kennedy and reminded him of the favors done in Cook
County. JFK muscled McNamara into selecting GD's swing-wing F-111
design. McNamara toed the line, and GD duly produced a designed
and engineering catastrophe, which eventually had to be recalled
but which nonetheless retrieved the value of Crown's debentures
and set General Dynamics firmly set firmly on the road to commercial
success. Attention all civics class teachers: America's leading
defense conglomerate today found its decisive turn of fortune
in vote fraud in Chicago in 1960.
Nader As Villain
Until Florida's
voting procedures began to monopolise public attention, the villain
of the hour was Ralph Nader, whose green vote seems at time of
writing to have been a decisive factor in Florida, New Hampshire,
Oregon, and New Hampshire. But for the votes for Nader in these
states, Gore would have won. Depending on what the Republicans
do, Nader could also turn out to have played a crucial role in
Wisconsin and Iowa.
This was not lost
on Democrats, some of whom left such finely crafted messages
on the Vote Nader 2000 website as Nov 8, 15:02 as: "Instead
of spitting on yourself, why not kill yourself. Save us the trouble
of having to hunt you down." "I hope to god that one
of the trees that Nader saves falls on him and kills him."
"I hope someone kills you!" "May Nader die slowly
in horrible agony from some loathsome disease!" (Al Berger)
"Go to hell and die!! If I see a car with a faggot Nader
bumper sticker I'm gonna smash it with a crowbar!!!" "An
Arab can never be trusted. They will wait as long as it takes
to do you in and this is exactly what Nader has done to the country."
"I hope you get run over by a communist (truck?) Burn in
hell you stupid SOB and you can suck on my dick you piece of
shit." "Kids across the country will die because they're
too frightened to tell someone they are gay. Their blood is on
your hands." "I don't ever want to see your faggot
face. You assholes handed the country to Bush. Bunch of environmental
faggots." "Ralph, please go see Dr. Kevorkian soon.
How can you live with the guilt?" "The Arab terror
brings down America." Liberals are natural born psychopaths.
We don't recall this level of animus from Republicans when Perot's
Reform Party cost George H. Bush reelection in 1992.
Such sentiments
weren't confined to Democratic yahoos on the web. Lloyd Grove,
who writes a gossip column for the Washington Post, had this
item a couple of days after the election. "NEW YORK, Nov.
8 Al Gore loyalists are enraged at Ralph Nader, whose third-party
campaign may have denied Gore the presidency. Around 2:30 a.m.
today in Bill and Hillary Clinton's hotel suite--where Miramax
mogul Harvey Weinstein and Talk magazine mistress Tina Brown
gathered with 50-odd beer-drinking movie folk and hangers-on
(including yours truly)--it was apparent that the Clintons are
no exception. After President Clinton ticked off the states,
including Florida, where Nader was hurting Gore, Brown's husband,
Harry Evans, exclaimed: 'I want to kill Nader!' 'That's not
a bad idea!' Sen.-elect Clinton replied with a big grin--immediately
followed by a collective cry of 'That's off the record!'"
Our Chat with
Nader
Talking to Nader
two days after the election we asked him what he thought of Grove's
story. "I called up Evans, and he was chagrined", Nader
told us. "He said everyone was drunk, and he apologized.
But look at what Hillary Clinton said right after. Can you imagine
what would happen if the Secret Service monitored a private citizen
making a remark like that about a public political figure?"
Nader called up New York's freshly elected junior senator too,
but it seems she was too busy with her proposed constitutional
amendment discarding the electoral college to get back to him.
We asked Nader if
he was disappointed at the Greens' 3 per cent national showing.
"I always knew the projected Green vote would drop when
people got into the voting booth", Nader answered. "You
should see some of the scare tactics of the Gore crowd. Telling
people that if they voted for me they'd been sponsoring back
street abortions. In part we have been the victim of inflated
expectations with people predicting that we were heading
for 8 per cent. On election day I said I reckoned we'd get about
3.5 per cent."
Who Needs 5 per
cent?
Frankly, here at
CounterPunch we're glad the Greens didn't get the 5 percent.
Coming into that "party-building" money would have
inevitably destroyed the party from the inside. The Greens really
are anarcho-syndicalists in the best sense. The party is a collective
of disparate political groupings, enviros, peace activists, and
dissident labor forces. Trying to mould them together into a
big political party with a grand strategic platform would, we
think, be self-defeating. Another four years of Democratic migration
to the right will only invigorate these organizations without
risking the pitfalls of trying to become a "major party."
The Greens aren't going to "win" until the system
is overhauled. However, they can still monkeywrench the System,
slice it open it up to show how diseased it is. Make the Gores
of the world pay a price. And that ain't bad.
We asked Nader when
he would prefer Bush or Gore in the White House and he hemmed
and hawed a bit. One can make the arguments both ways and we
chewed over the alternatives in our chat. On the one hand a Bush
victory deriving in part from Nader taking votes away from Gore
would remind Democrats that they had better listen more carefully
to Green demands in the years to come. On the other hand, Democrats
in opposition can call for unity and a setting-aside-of-differences
in recapturing power. If Gore wins the White House it will be
far easier to Greens to organize amid ongoing Democratic misbehavior
and betrayal. You can make the case both ways, which we duly
did, with Nader agreeing with both. We don't think he's made
up his mind on the matter, which is understandable.
We bid Nader to
be of good cheer and not to be oppressed by vilification by the
Democrats. "We've been writing that you're our Robespierre,
Ralph! With class actions suits instead of the guillotine!"
"Oh my God," he said laughing. "I hope no one
you say that to knows any history. At least you didn't say 'You're
our Marat." Nader voters didn't vote holding their noses,
so they didn't screw up their ballots.
Ralph's Favorite
Books
Here's some news
for that dwindling and beleagured minority of the populace who
readbooks: George Bush and Al Gore both asserted in the campaign
their favorite book to be the Bible. Bush also confessed to having
read a biography of Dean Acheson. Absent evidence that he's read
anything else, we can put that down as W's number two pick as
favorite book. Gore put Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir in second
place. Early in October we asked Nader for his two top favorites
and back came the answer "Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims
of Education and Harmony Ideology, by Laura Nader. We must confess
we've never read Whitehead's book, but we do know the one by
Ralph's sister. It's an attack on the notion of "coercive
harmony", which Laura Nader, a professor of anthropology
at UC Berkeley once defined as "basically a movement against
the contentious in anything, and it has very strange bedfellows,
from people with various psychiatric therapy movements, Christian
fundamentalists, corporations sick of paying lawyers, activists
who believe we should love each other We are talking about coercive
harmony an ideology that says if you disagree, you should
really keep your mouth shut."
So if you want to
understand what makes Nader run and why the shrieks of the Democrats
don't faze him, read his sister's (the real Dr Laura) book.
W As Mommy's
Boy
It's pleasing to
see that Palm Beach County held the country's future in the palm
of its election officers' hands. Back in 1979, down in that part
of Florida we interviewed George Bush Sr's mother Dorothy, a
charming lady living in Hobe Sound, one of the most intransigeantly
WASP enclaves in the universe. Like many in Bush's family she
referred to Poppy indulgently as a slightly eccentric and not
particularly promising family offshoot who had made the truly
odd decision to go and seek his fortune in Texas and the even
odder decision to seek the White House. Not long thereafter we
interviewed Barbara Bush, one of the nastier women we have ever
encountered in the course of journalistic business. The way weread
it, W as a kid was ranged solidly with Mom, marooned in the oil
patch as George Sr galloped around the globe. You doubt Mom was
angry? Please explain why she decided to look like her husband's
mother. W is a Mommy's boy, as is evidenced by his habit of hauling
around his "security pillow" wherever he goes.
Al as Manic-Depressive
And Al? Our feeling
that he was hyper-manic amid the Florida count is buttressed
by this communication from a CounterrPuncher in the Midwest.
"I've sometimes wondered if Gore's self aggrandizing lies
are a symptom of the manic phase of a manic-depressive illness.
The other day I was arguing with one of our more distinguished
faculty members and was just about to truck the idea out, saying
'those lies...' when he interrupted me with 'Oh, that's manic-depression',
adding, before I could express the lovely satisfaction one feels
when a baseless notion is validated. 'Not a big deal. I'm manic
depressive. Means I get a lot done--even if I drive my staff
nuts.' He then said (as he dashed off in a characteristically
manic way) 'He couldn't have a severe case or people would notice
that he's medicated.' It seems to me though that people have
noticed that Gore occasionally seems (over) medicated.
The Bush family
member I spent some time with in those months when George SR
was trying to get the Republican nomination was John Ellis,
a Bush cousin then working for NBC. On Election night 2000, it
was Ellis, if you believe the Washington Post for November 13,
who in his capacity as a member of the Fox election team looked
at the Florida numbers and instructed the Fox network to call
the state for Bush, which it duly did at 2.13am, swiftly copied
by the other networks. The network owned Voter News Service,
contrary to endless stories, never did issue a prediction.
Deny Gore, Deny
the Holocaust
Soon we reached
the point when to deny Al Gore the victory in Florida was to
deny the Holocaust. Here's what Michael Moore posted on his site
over the weekend after the election: "Sixty-two years ago
tonight, the Holocaust began in full force on what was called
Kristallnacht. The German government sent goon squads throughout
the country to trash and burn the homes, stores and temples
of its Jewish citizens. Seven years and 6 million slaughtered
lives later, the Jewish people of Europe were virtually extinct.
A few survived. I will not allow those who survived to come
here to this "land of the free" be abused again.
They are our fellow citizens in our great democracy, and their
voice, if I have anything to say about it, will never be snuffed
out."
Glorious Gridlock
Are the stakes really
that high. Of course they're not. That's why everyone is having
such a wonderful time. It makes scant difference which one is
"elected", or appointed by America's minuscule reserve
of "wise men" (we even saw Sandy Vanocur drafted in
as just such a "wise man"). We have glorious gridlock,
and the prospect of glorious gridlock for the next fouur years.
If Bush makes it, we'll probably get Al in four years after Bush
is retired, just as his dad was, by a recession. If Gore makes
it, we'll get W in 2004 for the same reasons, then in 2008 it
will be Hillary's turn.
And our greatest
president? Ford of course, who never even received a popular
mandate either as veep or president, hence the only commander
in hief indisputably elevated without vote fraud. New evidence
of his sterling merits, just in from a new report by the House
Budget Committee, Democratic minority staff: Table 2: Growth
of Non-defense Appropriations by Presidency. Average annual percent
change in real outlays, adjusted for timing shifts. Ford 1973-1977
7.2%; Nixon 1969-1973 4.3%; Bush 1989-1993 3.8%; Johnson 1965-1969
2.7%; Carter 1977-1981 2.2%; Clinton 1993-2001 2.0%; Reagan 1981-1989
-1.3%.
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