I often disagree with her, but admire and respect her writing.
For those unfamiliar with the woman or her writings, she is pro RKBA, but not a one issue voter.
Here's the first page. The entire article can be found at http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/09/13/cpreturns/index.html
Cliff
-----
Sept. 13, 2000 | Greetings, Salon readers! My column
returns, as promised, after summer hiatus when I worked on
book projects.
Politics was, of course, the season's main event. Americans are
staggering under the weary load of a presidential campaign that
seems to have been going on for years -- which it has, ever
since Monica Lewinsky's snapped thong shook the foundations
of the White House.
Since I live in a must-win swing state
(Pennsylvania) that could determine the
election, I've been bombarded with ads,
which began during July's Republican
Convention here in Philadelphia with the
Democrats' well-crafted but brazenly
defamatory assaults on Gov. George W.
Bush and his Texas record. But all's fair in
love and politics. It was up to the
Republicans to respond with ads bolstering
Bush's accomplishments (are there any?) and
introducing him as an authoritative and
well-rounded presence to a Northeastern
electorate that doesn't know him from Adam.
Alas, the principal distinction between the political parties these
days seems to be that Democrats are media-savvy -- and
indeed incestuously intertwined with the Hollywood glitterati --
while Republicans are still living in the dinosaur age of
communications, where good intentions are s-p-e-l-l-e-d out
as tediously as in a one-room schoolhouse. In this age of the
image, Republican operatives have the visual sense of Mr.
Magoo.
The first Republican counter-ad, which is still running and
running here and may lead to mass suicide by maddened
voters, bizarrely resembles a Democratic attack ad. Ostensibly
promoting Bush's commitment to educational reform (one of his
few solid positives), it shows him standing stiff as a
department-store dummy during his convention acceptance
speech, as he squints and mush-mouths through a few
sentences while inept cutaways flash generic children in generic
classrooms. Never in my political memory has there been a
major ad so amateurish and self-destructive, fixing a view of
the Texas governor as stolid and stupid in the minds of
Pennsylvania voters.
Hence I'm not surprised in the least by the Republican
nominee's recent slide in the polls. Actually, Bush would
probably make a competent, if not great president. He's no
verbal whiz, but as I said in this column last spring, much of the
national electorate is sick and tired of the glib, smartass Ivy
League establishment and its alumni network of casuistic
lawyers and snide media coteries. Maybe the country could
use a nice, stiff dose of West Texas dust and the old,
strike-it-rich romance of black crude. (See "Giant," the 1956
film now a TV staple, where the oil baron is played by rebel
icon James Dean.)
While I strongly agree (evidently with a plurality of male voters)
that the U.S. military urgently needs rebuilding after its gutting
and demoralizing misuse by the Clinton administration, there is
little else in the Republican platform that I as a pro-choice
feminist Democrat can identify with. There is something very
wrong with a party that has stifled and stunted one of its
brightest stars, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, because of her
moderate views on abortion. Whitman, whose articulateness
and command of the issues far surpass Bush's, should have
been our first female president.
On the other hand, despite having voted twice for Bill Clinton, I
loathe the present leadership of the Democratic Party, which
has been corrupted by the ruthless Clinton sleaze machine. I'd
like to put the entire Democratic National Committee out to
sea without an oar (see Géricault's "Raft of the 'Medusa'").
What a bunch of slimy hypocrites, proclaiming the cause of "the
People" while condescending to them. Al Gore's convention
acceptance speech last month nauseated me: the shameless
demagoguery and chicken-in-every-pot false promises; the
amoral use as stage props of pre-selected persons in the
audience, including a near-hysterical couple with a baby with a
birth defect; the shockingly cursory attention paid to national
defense and international affairs -- which shows exactly what's
wrong with the Democratic Party, with its unctuous pose as
Mother of Many Teats to the suffering masses.
My dilemma as a voter is that while I endorse the populist
principles of the Democratic Party at its best (Hubert
Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter look awfully
good at this distance), the present party is overrun by slick,
white, upper-middle-class bureaucrats, lawyers and flacks
spouting divisive identity-politics propaganda. At the start of
the primary season, when I supported Bill Bradley (for whom I
voted), I still felt that Gore was superbly prepared to assume
the presidency, despite his troubling record of exaggerations,
fibs and unnecessarily sycophantish endorsements of the
disgraced Bill Clinton. But Gore's manic, undignified scramble
for a persona and his ruthless lies about Bradley's record have
poisoned my view of him, perhaps irreparably.
At this time, I don't think it's necessarily in the best interest of
the country to protract the Clinton-Gore scandals for another
four years. While it's theoretically possible that Gore could still
convince me that he's fundamentally a person of character and
integrity, I am currently planning to vote for Ralph Nader. This
country's political dynamics and discourse would be vastly
improved by a strong third-party alternative -- which neither
the Reform nor Libertarian parties, or even the present Green
Party ticket on which Nader is running, has yet been able to
provide.
Next page | The grotesque dependence of the
Democratic Party on Hollywood cash and flash
For those unfamiliar with the woman or her writings, she is pro RKBA, but not a one issue voter.
Here's the first page. The entire article can be found at http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/09/13/cpreturns/index.html
Cliff
-----
Sept. 13, 2000 | Greetings, Salon readers! My column
returns, as promised, after summer hiatus when I worked on
book projects.
Politics was, of course, the season's main event. Americans are
staggering under the weary load of a presidential campaign that
seems to have been going on for years -- which it has, ever
since Monica Lewinsky's snapped thong shook the foundations
of the White House.
Since I live in a must-win swing state
(Pennsylvania) that could determine the
election, I've been bombarded with ads,
which began during July's Republican
Convention here in Philadelphia with the
Democrats' well-crafted but brazenly
defamatory assaults on Gov. George W.
Bush and his Texas record. But all's fair in
love and politics. It was up to the
Republicans to respond with ads bolstering
Bush's accomplishments (are there any?) and
introducing him as an authoritative and
well-rounded presence to a Northeastern
electorate that doesn't know him from Adam.
Alas, the principal distinction between the political parties these
days seems to be that Democrats are media-savvy -- and
indeed incestuously intertwined with the Hollywood glitterati --
while Republicans are still living in the dinosaur age of
communications, where good intentions are s-p-e-l-l-e-d out
as tediously as in a one-room schoolhouse. In this age of the
image, Republican operatives have the visual sense of Mr.
Magoo.
The first Republican counter-ad, which is still running and
running here and may lead to mass suicide by maddened
voters, bizarrely resembles a Democratic attack ad. Ostensibly
promoting Bush's commitment to educational reform (one of his
few solid positives), it shows him standing stiff as a
department-store dummy during his convention acceptance
speech, as he squints and mush-mouths through a few
sentences while inept cutaways flash generic children in generic
classrooms. Never in my political memory has there been a
major ad so amateurish and self-destructive, fixing a view of
the Texas governor as stolid and stupid in the minds of
Pennsylvania voters.
Hence I'm not surprised in the least by the Republican
nominee's recent slide in the polls. Actually, Bush would
probably make a competent, if not great president. He's no
verbal whiz, but as I said in this column last spring, much of the
national electorate is sick and tired of the glib, smartass Ivy
League establishment and its alumni network of casuistic
lawyers and snide media coteries. Maybe the country could
use a nice, stiff dose of West Texas dust and the old,
strike-it-rich romance of black crude. (See "Giant," the 1956
film now a TV staple, where the oil baron is played by rebel
icon James Dean.)
While I strongly agree (evidently with a plurality of male voters)
that the U.S. military urgently needs rebuilding after its gutting
and demoralizing misuse by the Clinton administration, there is
little else in the Republican platform that I as a pro-choice
feminist Democrat can identify with. There is something very
wrong with a party that has stifled and stunted one of its
brightest stars, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, because of her
moderate views on abortion. Whitman, whose articulateness
and command of the issues far surpass Bush's, should have
been our first female president.
On the other hand, despite having voted twice for Bill Clinton, I
loathe the present leadership of the Democratic Party, which
has been corrupted by the ruthless Clinton sleaze machine. I'd
like to put the entire Democratic National Committee out to
sea without an oar (see Géricault's "Raft of the 'Medusa'").
What a bunch of slimy hypocrites, proclaiming the cause of "the
People" while condescending to them. Al Gore's convention
acceptance speech last month nauseated me: the shameless
demagoguery and chicken-in-every-pot false promises; the
amoral use as stage props of pre-selected persons in the
audience, including a near-hysterical couple with a baby with a
birth defect; the shockingly cursory attention paid to national
defense and international affairs -- which shows exactly what's
wrong with the Democratic Party, with its unctuous pose as
Mother of Many Teats to the suffering masses.
My dilemma as a voter is that while I endorse the populist
principles of the Democratic Party at its best (Hubert
Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter look awfully
good at this distance), the present party is overrun by slick,
white, upper-middle-class bureaucrats, lawyers and flacks
spouting divisive identity-politics propaganda. At the start of
the primary season, when I supported Bill Bradley (for whom I
voted), I still felt that Gore was superbly prepared to assume
the presidency, despite his troubling record of exaggerations,
fibs and unnecessarily sycophantish endorsements of the
disgraced Bill Clinton. But Gore's manic, undignified scramble
for a persona and his ruthless lies about Bradley's record have
poisoned my view of him, perhaps irreparably.
At this time, I don't think it's necessarily in the best interest of
the country to protract the Clinton-Gore scandals for another
four years. While it's theoretically possible that Gore could still
convince me that he's fundamentally a person of character and
integrity, I am currently planning to vote for Ralph Nader. This
country's political dynamics and discourse would be vastly
improved by a strong third-party alternative -- which neither
the Reform nor Libertarian parties, or even the present Green
Party ticket on which Nader is running, has yet been able to
provide.
Next page | The grotesque dependence of the
Democratic Party on Hollywood cash and flash
