E-mail

HOME

A pioneer in mendacity: Make no mistake about it. Al Gore's entire life has been lived for this upcoming month. October 2000 is when Al lays to rest the ghosts of his grisly parents (his mother is still alive) and positions himself to carry off the Big Prize. Little wonder Dubya is wall-eyed with panic. He's spooked. He should be. If his researchers have done their job, he knows that, as one ranking political observer says, Gore enjoys nothing more than "sinking his political fangs into the flesh of the other side and ripping it." On the evidence of a new book, Al Gore: A User's Manual, Gore has pandered to power shamelessly his whole life and has never formed an opinion without first consulting his donor du jour, then the polls. The Solicitor-in-chief is the acknowledged master of the corporate shakedown. Prize-winning radical left journalists, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have done a bang-up research job on Gore's career in politics and since he has been feeding at the public trough his whole live-long life, there's a lot of evidence. Gore, the so-called "Boy Scout of the Clinton administration, a politician of ... integrity and probity," say Cockburn and St. Clair, is the chief designer of the atmosphere of thievery, lies, prevarication and half truths that pollutes the Clinton White House. He is divisive and dangerous, a racemonger who would set race relations back, with blacks angry at whites for trying (as Gore claims) to suppress them, and whites livid at Gore for calling them racists. Gore was nurtured to power by parents certain of his destiny. At his father's knee he learned the liberal idiom of the New Deal, and he spent his adult life using the rhetoric to destroy the substance. In the kitchens of the American left, a bitter debate is taking place. Gore is the lesser of two evils. A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. But there is no way that a true liberal -- one who has been on the receiving end of a Gore initiative, or a union member who has seen his cohorts beaten into bankruptcy -- knows this is anything but a deal with the Devil. And in Christian circles, there is little doubt that they believe Gore is the Antichrist. Charming on the surface, pure calculating evil underneath, interested in nothing but the power to shape life into the conditions he sees as ideal. The democratic process is an impediment he has learned to circumvent. Let's take just one of Gore's initiatives. He is the environmental presidential wannabe, right? He wrote Earth in the Balance, he bangs on about global warming and no more cars. David Brower, the grand old man of American environmentalism, concluded after the Clinton/Gore's first two years in office that, "Gore and Clinton have done more harm to the environment than Reagan and Bush combined." While promising citizens concerned that it would never happen, Gore approved a toxic waste incinerator beside an elementary school in Ohio, and then lifted the injunction in the Pacific Northwest against logging in old-growth forests. The Olympia peninsula has been stripped. The salvage logging rider to a spending bill, signed by Clinton in 1995, urged on by Gore, consigned millions of acres of National Forest lands to the chainsaw, exempt from any environmental laws or judicial review. In 1999 the Clinton-Gore administration killed the Biosaftey Convention in order to protect the interests of biotech firms. Gore quit on his promise to protect marine mammals. He allowed the strip- mining shearing off of entire mountain tops in Appalachia, obliterating 1,000 streams, polluting the water supply and filling the valleys with rubble. In 1996 Gore directly ordered the EPA to slow down implementation of tougher pesticide standards that were required by the Food Quality Protection Act. Friends of the Earth, when declaring for Bradley, said, "When Gore got into a unique position of power to lead, he failed in serious and perplexing ways and even opened the way for Draconian erosions of existing environmental protections at home and abroad." The corruption of Gore's activity on the environment is equally matched by Gore's initiatives in Russia; Gore's pet project REGO (Re- inventing Government); his use of Willie Horton to defeat Jesse Jackson, which boomeranged into the defeat of Michael Dukakis; his manipulation of oil policy to fatten Occidental Petroleum, and therefore his family's bank balance and so on. "Find a difficult issue in Washington," say Cockburn and St. Clair, "and Gore has probably been on the wrong side of it. Find an awkward fact about his life and Gore has almost certainly misrepresented it." No matter whether you agree with Gore's initiatives and policies, whether you are on the left or the right, one thing is clear. Gore lies. He lies when the damning proof is evident. He lies about his pro-life votes, which are a matter of record. He is on tape urging the joys of tobacco years after his sister died of lung cancer. He lied about being a war hero, about inventing the Internet, about finding the Love Canal, about being the model for Love Story. He lies when there is no good reason to lie and when he can be easily caught. This is new and terrifying territory in the annals of mendacity. There is only one reasonable response. Take back our money. Starve them out. Liberalism has been shown to be so morally bankrupt, that the only leaders who can win, are unfit to govern. This kind of behaviour is why many sensible and good-hearted people can't bring themselves to vote, (it's not apathy, it's disgust.) And why many thinking people say Day in Ottawa and Dubya in Washington, as long as they reverse the half-century of thievery in the name of democracy to which the people of North America have been subject.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.