December
2, 2002 12:20
p .m.
Gore Reveals GOP Plot
Let
me divulge how we operate.
he Democratic
leadership is having a very rough time, and Al Gore is their roughest
time. Since, as a conservative, this columnist is presumably a link in
the vast right-wing conspiracy — bolder and more comprehensive than
anything Senator McCarthy had in mind when he talked about left-wing conspiracies
— let me divulge how we operate.
The Republican party
gets an idea. Let's say to drill for oil in Alaska.
A GOP operative is
designated to pass that idea along to the thought-factories the GOP controls.
Somebody calls Rush
Limbaugh. Then the Washington Times. Then Fox News. Then George
Will. The marching order goes something like this:
Fellow-gangsters.
There is oil in parts of Alaska. If we drill for that oil, we can get
contributions to the GOP from the people who get the drilling contracts.
Subsequently, from the people who build pipelines to transport the oil.
And ever after, from the sale of that oil to — well, gas stations,
that sort of thing. GET THE WORD OUT.
Dress it up. You
know, oil is scarce, the American people need oil. Etc., etc., etc.
You — Rush — dress that up in populist language, talk about
the great American spirit of adventure and development. You — George
— put that in fancy historical language, the stuff about manifest
destiny, etc. You — gentlemen at Fox — talk about the news
effect of Alaskan oil exploration, how it will diminish the egos in
the Mideast. That sort of thing — I hardly need tell you how to
do it. Just do it.
But the networking
has been exposed now. In Lewinsky days, Hillary wasn't able to pin it
down with archaeological precision. For that reason, Al Gore lost the
election. But now that he has recovered from that loss, shaved his beard,
and written a new book, he is back on the scene with a sure-enough afflatus:
the Republican National Committee, on through the networkers, resulting
in — a new Zeitgeist!
Mr. Gore, in a recent news conference, got quite specific on the matter.
He was so enthusiastic about his revelation that he lost complete control
of his language. But that didn't matter. It wasn't as if he was captaining
a 747-landing, which calls for razor-sharp precision. In his interview
with the New York Observer, Al Gore said that Fox, the Washington
Times, and Rush Limbaugh — "there's a bunch of them"
— are, some of them, "financed by wealthy ultraconservative
billionaires." Non-wealthy billionaires are presumably too busy trying
to become wealthy billionaires to give much time to politics. Tom Daschle,
picking his fight with Rush Limbaugh, spoke of the "shrill rhetoric
of conservative talk radio." Shrill rhetoric is the kind of language
used by those who are exploited by wealthy ultraconservative billionaires.
And then Al Gore is telling us that the effect of the vast right wing
conspiracy is — well, let him tell it: "They'll create a little
echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start baiting the mainstream media
for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the Zeitgeist."
Pushed into the Zeitgeist! How do you do that? Affect the spirit
of the age? Does Coca-Cola know how to do that? Burger King? Muhammad?
Back to oil in Alaska.
Are we hearing it that the other side hadn't had its say in the matter?
Yet drilling for oil in Alaska was first proposed about 25 years ago,
and permission to proceed has not yet been granted. Is that because the
Zeitgeist was being stalled by the Clinton-Gore administration before
the wealthy billionaires finally
took over and handed policy-making over to Rush Limbaugh?
Persisting with the
language of Al Gore, he explains. "Pretty soon the mainstream media
goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and
lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the
Zeitgeist." We're being told that the people who take polls and say
that half the country is in favor of drilling for oil in Alaska rigged
those so-called objective polls. They present the polls "disingenuously,"
pass them off as popular writ, like a lot of election polls. In other
words, they know they're cheating. But what does that matter to them?
Just so they do what the wealthy billionaires want.
. . . Is this stuff going to work? The Democratic leadership just can't
stand it that the conservative critique is making headway in America.
They preferred it the way it used to be, Clinton sleeping in the White
House, al-Qaeda and Saddam undisturbed, and the wild life in Alaska unthreatened.
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he Democratic
leadership is having a very rough time, and Al Gore is their roughest
time. Since, as a conservative, this columnist is presumably a link in
the vast right-wing conspiracy — bolder and more comprehensive than
anything Senator McCarthy had in mind when he talked about left-wing conspiracies
— let me divulge how we operate.
