Capitol Ideas: Unpatriotic Gore
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Unpatriotic Gore As I write, Hurricane Monica is erupting, and it is difficult to predict the state of the Clinton White House a month from now. There's just one...
...leave it to the investigative reporters to explore Albert Gore, Sr.'s relationship with Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer, for decades a money launderer in the U.S...
...handsomely to represent him in Washington and it is said that he also paid Gore Jr.'s Harvard bills...
...Former Wyoming senator Malcolm Wallop, today chairman of Frontiers of Freedom Institute, a conservative group, knew Gore in the Senate, and is not concerned about going on the record...
...There's just one point about Bill and Hillary that I want to make...
...There is nothing to this man...
...The ABM treaty is still in place even though the Soviet Union is not...
...Gore has done nothing to upset the feminists, you can be sure...
...Jackson famously took the side of the people against the encroachments of federal power...
...Thanks to these successfully mounted attacks on American defenses, there is now rising uncertainty whether U.S...
...for the Soviet leadership...
...He found Gore to be "not much for bipartisan friendships, not very collegial," and he didn't know other Republican senators who were close to him either...
...It may be parsed as skepticism about big government...
...nuclear weapons, not having been tested for many years, will actually work...
...His green streak went seriously to the heart of military preparedness," said Wallop, who served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence...
...His worldview ever since has remained that of the earnest rookie liberal...
...He took on the Vatican, then doing its best to oppose the U.N.-sponsored eugenics conference at Cairo...
...Senate, where he served for another eight years, ran for president in 1988, went nowhere, let his father down...
...When he returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1971, the Pentagon Papers story was erupting...
...virtually none in his first term...
...Such is the main distinction between Republican and Democratic noblesse oblige...
...Having succumbed to extremism without knowing it, he is vulnerableif only because he has so many times gone out of his way to accuse Republicans of extremism...
...Watergate soon followed...
...Michael Waller of the American Foreign Policy Council notes that in the late 1960's Gore Sr...
...and by the year 2000 half of it will have vanished into thin air...
...More recently, Gore's telephone fundraising from the wrong telephone was publicized...
...Even before Lewinsky, they liked to complain about how badly they were being treated by the press...
...the people who depend on the government...
...Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler came through with a job at the Nashville Tennessean...
...His mother said of him that he's a born conformist: "He wanted to do what we wanted him to do...
...As things stand, he is going to have to patch things up with a key constituency, labor unions, who are threatened by anti-industrial scare scenarios...
...Those who have pursued Clinton recently with all the zeal of converts to the cause of an adversary press know full well that Al is one of them...
...The press has had few unkind words for Gore...
...This was the historical moment whenthe media found that they could prevail with their agenda over a government unfamiliar with the new rules...
...was negotiating arms reductions with the Soviet Union...
...In November 1993, Bill Clinton told Rolling Stone that even though he had fought the liberals' battles for years, he had "not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press...
...From 1977 until 1984, Gore represented Tennessee's fourth congressional district, the home territory of the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson...
...The press had been covering for him, not treating him as they would have treated a Republican in the same position...
...Unlike Clinton, Gore may not have noticed the political minefields facing the climate-change true-believer...
...Faced with Hollywood disapproval, Tipper gave up on her culturally conservative raunchy-lyrics campaign and signed on with the chic "choice" crowd...
...Our hands tied by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (signed but unratified), we depend on computer models to guess whether or not bombs will explode...
...That set the tone of the coverage for the next four years...
...By 1997 he was celebrating the anniversary of Roe v. Wade at a "gala luncheon" at the Mayflower Hotel with actress Demi Moore and Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League...
...A long-time Senate staffer and strong conservative recalls Gore's time in the Senate in these words: "Not particularly bright—the media's fawning on him as an intellectual is a joke...
...Bush at his most supercilious addressed the nation as if we were peons who couldn't get into his country club, Mr...
...Although well equipped with numerical data, Gore "had a habit of trying to dominate the discussion without being well informed on the broader issues...
...He is educated enough to understand the arguments of the environmentalists but gullible enough to take them at face value...
...In 1984 he told a constituent of his "deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong...
...His claim that he and his wife Tipper were role models for Love Story caused some amusement...
...Gore and Jackson, it is fair to say, are at opposite poles of the American polity...
...Gore was responsible for tasking a good deal of the intelligence apparatus away from defense information-gathering and into environmental information-gathering...
...24 March /998 • The American Spectator...
...He went on to the U.S...
...not a player in the Senate...
...Wallop considers Gore to be vulnerable on defense issues because he took stands that were calculated to win support in the liberal-dominated presidential primaries, but would leave the occupant of the Oval Office in a politically exposed position (and the U.S...
...He had always thought of himself as a writer...
...By 1994 the feminists had him on a tight leash...
...The trigger element tritium, with a half life of 12.5 years and essential for all nuclear weapons, is no longer manufactured anywhere in the U.S...
...Well, as of January 21,1998, when the Washington Post published its Monica Lewinsky story, he found out what form that "credit" had taken...
...Now, at last, the Clintons know what it felt like to work in the Reagan White House...
...But this was a byproduct of the Beltway's holy cause — campaign finance reform...
...The devoted pal of Carol Browner of EPA, he is also the author of the extremist tract Earth in the Balance, parts of which, the columnist Tony Snow has pointed out, are hard to distinguish from the Unabomber Manifesto...
...A staffer who worked on the House Energy and Commerce Committee remembers Gore as someone "who would only show up for committee hearings if the cameras were there...
...Gore has strongly espoused the "green," anti-nuke outlook...
...Hammer paid Gore Sr...
...Gore is a well-born hack...
...Good old David Halberstam was Gore's hero, and Gore wanted to be a journalist, too...
...Wooden, maybe...
...I am proud to have my fortunes tied to this president,' he said...
...He doesn't seem to have noticed that sympathy for nature has been exploited to conceal a different agenda: antagonism to the free-market system...
...Remember the "sleaze factor" that the press liked to harp on...
...Gore ran a couple of sting operations, even caught a councilman taking a bribe...
...As to that "reinventing" fantasy, the very different structure of incentives within government fatally undermined it...
...monly heard criticism of Gore is that he is a bit too perfect for his own good," said a Washington Post reporter at the time of Clinton's first inauguration...
...Here we meet Mr...
...22 March 1998 • The American Spectator He was not a liberal firebrand...
...More than anyone in White House history, Gore shares the mentality of the Washington press corps...
...But to have grasped that would have been "cynicism," which he fearlessly criticized in a Harvard address...
...Frank Rich of the New York Times recently made one of the more astute comments on Gore, comparing him to another senator's son, George Bush...
...Where Mr...
...A bit too earnest, perhaps...
...They know it from personal encounters and chummy dinner parties in Cleveland Park...
...That was the way it went...
...But Gore really believes that the world has a serious population problem (the environmentalists have said so...
...A sober look at the man who would be president...
...Ozone, who takes global warming too seriously...
...not a serious legislator...
...Gore condescends to us as if we were idiots who couldn't get into the Ivy League...
...Gore worked in the private sector for a little over four years...
...The best one can say for Gore is that he did not show up for the abortionists' sickening celebratory black-tie dinner dance at the Mayflower Hotel this year...
...He got to know Gore when they were members of an anns control observer group in Geneva...
...So, be grateful, Bill and Hillary...
...But he has enjoyed immunity from the hissing and jeering and ridicule that Vice President Dan Quayle lived with for four years...
...weapons plants have been designated toxic waste sites and satellized by the Environmental Protection Agency...
...We still don't have a defense, and it's partly because of the senator whose partner was Armand Hammer," Waller said...
...He voted to amend the Civil Rights Act to define the word "person" to include the unborn "from the moment of conception...
...He was "pretty disingenuous about posturing for the Senate television cameras...
...Cufflinks, they were talking about...
...He stressed that this was not an ideological judgment, contrasting Gore with other senators—Bumpers, Feinstein, Mikulski, Wellstone — whom he respects as players even while strongly disagreeing with their philosophy...
...Then he was plucked from impending obscurity by the political Houdini of our time, Bill Clinton...
...itself militarily exposed...
...led the Senate charge against an American missile defense...
...The U.S...
...Gore's hypocrisy about tobacco money and exploitation of his sister's death from lung cancer have also been exposed...
...Gore learned his lessons well, all agree...
...T he Leninist phrase "useful idiot" seems appropriate here, and Gore should tread carefully...
...But in 1992 he supported "the right of a woman to choose...the government has no business coming in and ordering a woman to do what the government thinks is best...
...Heady days...
...He was trained to believe that those in high office are expected to represent, well...
...And the final paragraph of a 1995 Washington Post story by Ann Devroy and Stephen Barr is worth repeating here: "Gore, for his part, argues that Clinton `will go down as one of the most successful presidents in history,' and that recognition will come in time for both of them to be reelected...
...Even the Washington Post's famed Ann Devroy came up with Al Gore dream stories: Witty in private (just as Walter Mon-dale was always said to be...
...Gore, who grew up in a hotel on Embassy Row in the years when his father, Albert Gore, Sr., was a senator from Tennessee, is a pure creature of government: Of the government, for the government and by the government...
...awash with enthusiasm for his various duties, more than a figurehead, taken seriously, bucks tradition in vice president's role, armed with the correct public language for a vice president, studied management books and brought in tutors to learn how to "reinvent government...
...This month, let's take a look at Al Gore...
...Karpov, than by the American side...
...He often seemed to be more interested "in being viewed positively by the Soviet negotiator, Mr...
...The most comTom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...They gave you a pass for six years—ever since the "6o Minutes" Gennifer Flowers interview, to be exact...
...attacking in a purely partisan way not related to the issues, while denying that he was interested in the presidency," Wallop said...
...So America must come to the rescue with a flood of condoms...
Vol. 31 • March 1998 • No. 3
