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Paul Begala's Hate Speech Al Gore, presidential candidate of the Dimple party, proposed a meeting with George W. Bush last week "not to negotiate, but to improve the tone of our dialogue in...
...It wasn't released until November 7, Election Day...
...The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African-Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they're all red too...
...You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart— it's red...
...That's where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third Reich," Loftus said at the Sarasota Reading Festival...
...Lacking any antipathy to exploit, Gore attempted to mobilize guilt in its place...
...Charles Paul Freund, writing for Reason Online, points to one egregious example...
...The headline was unconscionable, as was the retelling of Loftus's tendentious argument...
...his campaign portrayed its blundering supporters as, once again, victims of history...
...So you can see the pickle this created for the actuaries...
...Because it's open season on Bushes...
...The German government sent goon squads throughout the country to trash and burn the homes, stores, and temples of its Jewish citizens...
...By this same logic, of course, almost any family that had international financial dealings in the years before World War II can be said to have "links" to the Nazis...
...Because many of the supposedly confused voters were blacks and elderly Jews, such figures as Jesse Jackson and film maker Michael Moore adopted one of the most grotesquely shameless political positions in recent political history: the exploitation of slavery and even the Holocaust in the interest of padding Al Gore's Florida vote...
...The characterization of the Academy's analysis by Vice President Gore is erroneous...
...In the midst of the Florida electoral war, this headline appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: "Author links Bush family to Nazis...
...A few survived...
...This is not "a more complex picture...
...Not really...
...You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees—it's red...
...You may recall Begala as the altar boy of the Clinton administration, a man who distinguished himself during the Lewinsky scandal as the Clinton spinner who noted credulously that his boss had "looked the American people in the eye, and said he did not have an improper physical relationship, that he didn't ask anyone to lie...
...This was a fairly outrageous misrepresentation, as you might imagine, given the sober reputation of actuaries...
...Not so Begala...
...He can start by putting a muzzle on his own advisers...
...Why single out Bush...
...Yes, we know litigators like to talk this way...
...But no, being used by and lied to by Bill Clinton seems to have had the perverse effect of aggravating Begala's political Manicheanism: His side is still Virtue on stilts, and Republicans are Evil incarnate...
...Paul Begala's Hate Speech Al Gore, presidential candidate of the Dimple party, proposed a meeting with George W. Bush last week "not to negotiate, but to improve the tone of our dialogue in America...
...Too late to hurt Gore...
...When the Union Banking Corporation dissolved in 1951, Prescott Bush made out with $1.5 million...
...His November 13 essay for the MSNBC website, titled "Banana Republicans," is an astonishing outburst...
...The Academy regrets that the public may have received the erroneous impression from the ads that it supports Vice President Gore's Social Security and Medicare proposals...
...Sixty-two years ago . . . the Holocaust began in full force on what was called Kristallnacht...
...This is political hate speech...
...Yet if you were a close watcher of the Gore campaign ads attacking the Bush Social Security plan, you might have noticed that they used the academy's logo and featured this claim: "The American I Scrapbook Academy of Actuaries looked at [Bush's] plan and concluded it would lead to catastrophic results...
...The biggest problem with [the Gore] storyline" in West Palm Beach, Freund notes, "is that it lacked a villain...
...But it strikes us that it's the last metaphor we need to hear from people who may soon be in proximity to real nuclear buttons...
...The worst, in a close race, has been Paul Begala...
...How to defend their nonpartisan honor without seeming to favor the Bush campaign...
...You might think that after the shock to his system Begala must have suffered upon learning the truth of the Lewinsky allegations, the man would seek a new line of work, one where he wouldn't be duped so badly...
...Still More Anti-Bush Hate...
...According to John Loftus, author of Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks and a former prosecutor with the Justice Department's Nazi War Crimes Unit, George W. Bush's granddad Prescott was a principal in a bank that was secretly owned by Nazi industrialists during the 1930s and '40s...
...But there's plenty Gore can do on his own to "improve the tone...
...But at least the Herald-Tribune pointed out that both the Kennedys and the Rockefellers benefited from Nazi-related corporations and other such financial connections...
...Begala learned this shtick from James Carville, who performs it with greater panache and at least seems aware it is shtick...
...The academy is the nonprofit, nonpartisan association representing actuaries in Washington, with the emphasis on nonpartisan...
...Begala is reacting against the national map that showed Bush counties in red and Gore precincts in blue...
...Better Late Than Never Somehow it figures that the American Academy of Actuaries would have a highly sophisticated theory of how to hedge political risks...
...A bold rebuke...
...Seven years and 6 million slaughtered lives later, the Jewish people of Europe were virtually extinct...
...Bush cordially turned Gore down...
...Now, what was that again about the tone of our dialogue...
...In fact, the group had issued a report on October 26 criticizing the Social Security and Medicare plans of both camps, and characterizing them as "incomplete" and "potentially misleading...
...After he muzzles his advisers, if he is indeed serious about improving the tone of "our dialogue," Al Gore should dissociate himself from the not-so-subtle slurs by backers who are associating George W. Bush with the Nazis...
...Charming...
...As Moore wrote on his website in arguing for a new vote in Palm Beach County, 'There are tens of thousands of people who lived through [the Holocaust], escaped the ovens, and are now living out their final years in South Florida...
...The actuaries no doubt carefully calibrated the costs and benefits...
...Designed by and approved by local Florida Democrats, the controversial ballot could not be tied to any Bush allies...
...So much for the tone of our dialogue...
...They issued a statement that read, in part: "We call upon the Gore campaign to stop misusing the American Academy of Actuaries' name and logo in its paid political advertisements...
...The Nuclear Button Option" Gore strategists last week told the New York Times that their campaign is preparing to call not just for a recount but for a revote in Palm Beach, if necessary, and that they (the Gore people) have nicknamed this "the nuclear button option...
...You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay—it's red...
...I will not allow those who survived to come here to this land of the free to be abused again.'" And that's not all...
...If you look closely at that map," he writes, "you see a more complex picture...
...Quoth Begala: "That's enough...
...I believe in this man...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 11
