If Erich Segal ever decides to update what we now know to be the first biography of Al Gore, Jr.— usually referred to by its original title, Love Story— he could easily and accurately change that novel's most famous line to: "Being a Democrat means never having to say you're sorry." For although the Democrats have always had a remarkable talent for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, these defeats, if you listen to the Democratic party apologists, are never the Democrats' own fault and they, accordingly, refuse to apologize for them; and although the Democrats sell out their own supposed constituencies on a regular basis, it is wrong, we are told, to call the Democrats themselves to account for this; and even though the Democrats have never encountered a "principle" they were not willing to compromise or outright abandon for little or no political return— at least, none for the people who are actually being sold out, though there is usually some personal political lagniappe for the Democrat himself— we are not to upbraid them for this: they are not sorry about doing these things because, quite simply, none of it is their fault.
The idea of personal responsibility is not the only one that is foreign to so many Democrats. The concept of simple logic escapes the average Democratic party hack when it comes to his irrational desire to defend the all-important party. Fortunately, Orwell has supplied us with a word to describe this process of political ratiocination: doublethink.
Nothing reveals the hollowness and desperation of Democratic doublethink more than the frantic attempt to blame Ralph Nader for the result of the latest presidential election— an election that, if you listen to the Democrats, their creature Gore both lost and at the same time didn't lose.
Obviously, you must accept the fact that Gore lost the election if you want to blame Nader for that loss: it makes no sense whatsoever to blame someone for costing you an election that you actually won. So for the sake of the blame-Nader strategy, the Democrats, provisionally, accept that Gore lost Florida. They say the votes that went to Nader in Florida would have given Gore the edge in that state.
At the same time— and using, evidently, a part of their alleged brains that could not possibly be on speaking terms with the part that makes the above argument— the Democrats claim that Gore actually won the popular (and therefore the electoral) vote in Florida, but the state was stolen from him through fraud.
So in Gore, the Democrats have a Schroedinger's cat of a candidate: he's both dead and not-dead; he both won the election and lost it: same election; same candidate; same opponents: two different, mutually exclusive outcomes wholeheartedly believed in by the Democratic doublethinkers. These Democrats evidently believe in all manner of simultaneous parallel universes, but, sadly, have difficulty dealing with the physical and logical laws of this actual one.
The Democrats claim that the election was stolen from Gore by chicanery, if not outright fraud, in Florida— they claim that Gore, in fact, actually won Florida. The merit of this claim was apparent from the beginning and its strength grows daily— but it is undermined by the mutually exclusive claim that Gore lost Florida because of Nader (or Buchanan or any other third-party candidate). When the votes that were ignored in Florida are finally counted— and they will be— it will in all likelihood be established as incontrovertible fact that Gore won in Florida. Advancing this argument, and this argument alone, would be a winning long-term strategy for the Democrats. After all, it's not as though the Republicans don't already have a history of fixing presidential elections. Anyone remember Watergate? For good reason, people do not have a hard time believing that the Republicans would rig an election.
But the Democrats make no apologies for undermining themselves in this way. Remember: being a Democrat means never having to say you're sorry. And lining up as many excuses as possible, even if they contradict each other and make those who advance them look outright simple, is part of the great Democratic tradition. After all, the point here, if you are this type of Democrat, is not to win (Gore did eventually concede, telling the minority voters whose votes were not counted that he and his "principles" had decided that their votes were unimportant after all) or even to be right (these Democrats evidently lack the capacity to tell a reasonable and convincing argument from an irrational and moronic one)— the point is to find someone else to blame. That is an end in itself if you are a Democratic party hack— and the more people you find to blame, the better. If you have to sacrifice simple logic to line up more potential candidates for blame, well...goodbye logic, then.
What you won't hear— at least not from these Democrats— is that Gore lost because he was unable to carry his own home state, Tennessee; or the traditionally Democratic state of West Virginia; or Arkansas; or New Hampshire; you won't hear that if he had managed to tread water in any one of these states— all of which Clinton won in 1996— Florida simply would not have mattered. (In only one of these states— New Hampshire— could votes that went to Nader have made a difference in the outcome, but only if the Nader votes went to Gore at a rate Gore people had no plausible reason to expect. But Gore people, being Democrats, are unconcerned with reason or plausibility, so we hear— and can expect to keep hearing— claims that Nader cost Gore New Hampshire, too. Sure the claim is false, but truth is not the point. The point is to shift blame, to divert the eye, to perform an act of political legerdemain.)
What you also won't hear is that responsibility for the 5-4 Supreme Court vote that gave the election to Bush can be laid, at least in part, at the feet of the very Democrats who are now crying "foul." Clarence Thomas, who sided with the majority in the recount decision, is patently unqualified to be sitting on the Supreme Court, and would not be sitting today if 11 Democrats had not voted for him <Thomas Vote>; Antonin Scalia, the other bugbear the Democrats like to throw at us to scare us (and who also voted with the majority in the decision to give the election to Bush) garnered all 47 Democrat votes, including— what's this here?— Al Gore's own! <Scalia Vote> Now that must smart!
But then again, maybe it doesn't. Maybe the Democrats are incapable of correctly gauging even their own self-inflicted pain. For they not only have an infinite capacity for performing doublethink when necessary; as well as a seemingly fathomless ability to find reasons to compromise principle (if Scalia was such an obvious Reagan-litmus-test-approved reactionary ideologue (and indeed he was) and threat to supposed Democrat values, might not one—just one— Democrat have cast a dissenting vote, just on principle? The Democrats actually had enough votes to successfully torpedo Scalia's nomination by filibustering in the (at the time) Republican-controlled Senate; but evidently the party that demanded we all join together and vote for their creature in this past election lacked the internal unity— or, more likely, the integrity— to do that; and will probably still lack these qualities when it comes time to confirm— or not— Bush's abysmal cabinet appointees); but the Democrats also have an equally Orwellian talent for banishing inconvenient facts (such as those I've just mentioned) to the memory hole. They confirmed Scalia and Thomas, but you'll see Al Gore turn down six figures in corporate soft money before you'll hear a Democrat mention this, much less apologize for it. It is understandable why Republicans don't apologize for it: Republicans think these horrendous appointees are wonderful justices. But the Democrats claim to recognize Scalia and Thomas for the disasters that they are. So why did they confirm them? This question is not even asked, much less answered, by the Democrats.
And the loyalty of Democratic followers seems to depend on their ability to perform this same memory hole trick. At the very least, it is dependent upon their not checking on the Democrats and calling them to account for the many times when the Democrats abandon their "principles". And the party faithful, the hack-apologists, dutifully do this.
But those of us who are fed up with how often the Democrats lie; how often they blame others for their own failings; how often they compromise their supposed principles and rationalize the results; how often their rhetoric of being the party that stands up for the interests of the average citizen rather than those of the privileged plutocracy does not match their actions— we are tired of banishing the Democrats' hypocritical behavior to the memory hole. For us, these promissory notes have come due, and the Democrats are not willing to pay up. Morally bankrupt, the Democratic party offers us nothing more than more promissory notes. So many of us voted for Nader, in whom we correctly saw a candidate whose rhetoric we agreed with and whose decades-long record of performance matched his rhetoric.
We, unlike the Democrats, actually have nothing to apologize for. And, amazingly, I have not heard one Nader supporter blame Gore for Nader's loss; no Nader supporter has claimed that if Gore's votes had all just gone to Nader, Nader would have won the election. (In many Democrats' eyes, the only thing that would save this never-made claim from absurdity would be if it were a Democrat making it.) Those of us who voted for Nader do not think any votes "belonged" to Nader other than the ones he actually received.
Contrast Nader supporters' attitude with that of the Democrats who argue that Gore's votes should include the ones that went to Gore; the ones that are disputed; and the ones that went to Nader. That way, their candidate, who didn't lose, would never have lost. Or something like that.
Now remember, the Democrats don't claim that the votes that went to Nader went to him by mistake due to a confusing ballot, as happened with those disputed votes for Buchanan in Florida. They claim Nader's votes— which as a matter of undisputed fact went, in this real world, to Nader— belong (I'm guessing by birth-right or something similar) to Gore, on the typically psychotic Democratic assumption that the rules of whatever parallel universe they happen to prefer today ought to obtain in this actual world.
This is self-delusion of colossal proportions, comparable in imbecility to the Republican (and Democratic) belief that if you give more money to the rich, they will be sure to pass the lion's share of it on to the classes below them. It might even surpass the idiocy of that Democrat-and-Republican-shared trickle-down fairy tale.
Of course, what lies at the heart of the Democrats'— and their creatures'— attacks on Nader and those who voted for Nader is a profound contempt for genuine democracy. Nader opened up a prospect of genuine opposition to Republican cruelty that the Democrats themselves are unwilling to face. Nader's candidacy threw the Republicanism of the Democrats into sharper relief. And the reason the Democrats' attacks on Nader have been so vicious is precisely because they are based on numerous demonstrable falsehoods. The Democrats know finesse won't work when you have nothing with which to finesse. So the strategy becomes: break out the lies and proclaim them loudly.
The main falsehood goes roughly thus: Nader and the Democrats stand for essentially the same principles and have virtually identical stances on most of the important issues; but since Nader had no chance of winning the election, the votes that went to him should have gone to the candidate whose positions on these issues are the same as Nader's but who had an actual chance of winning— that is, to Al Gore.
But the fact remains that if you are opposed to the death penalty, you might just as well have wasted your vote on Bush as on Gore: both are rabid proponents of state-sponsored killing. Only Nader is opposed. If you are in favor of reforming the political system to eliminate the influence of big money— which for the most part means the influence of corporations who donate millions to both major parties— you might just as well have wasted your vote on Bush as on Gore. Only Nader favored real reform that puts the political process back in the hands of the people. If you thought welfare "reform" had thrown too many innocent children and other poor people out on the streets, further immiserating them, and without making any attempt even to account, much less provide, for them, you might just as well have wasted your vote on Bush as on Gore. Only Nader was in favor of saving welfare and helping the poor. Only Nader opposed NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO, based on their predicted and now demonstrated effect of encouraging the export of jobs to whatever country has the lowest wages, lowest environmental standards, lowest labor standards, and worst human rights standards— ensuring both that the country that loses those jobs is worse off, and that the country that gains them is no better off and, indeed, frequently worse off as well.
Gore not only favors these pro-business "trade agreements" (as of course does Bush)— his and Clinton's administration foisted them on us. No Republican president, despite the Republicans' best efforts, could deliver the disaster that is NAFTA. Clinton and Gore openly celebrate the fact that only they could deliver NAFTA because they had the ability to bring the needed Democrat votes to this distinctly Republican-smelling favor-the-rich "trade agreement". Clinton and Gore— and the Democrats in general— openly celebrate their rightward shift on such major issues— welfare "reform"; social security; the selling out of the American worker; "get-tough-on-crime" legislation— and then claim that the only candidate who offered genuine alternatives to these disastrous policies— Ralph Nader— was stealing "their" votes.
If adopting the other candidate's positions on issues is "vote stealing", then the Democrats have been stealing votes from the Republicans for over eight years. Is it any wonder, then, that nearly half the electorate, given the choice between a real Republican (Bush) and a Republican-in-Democrat's-clothing (Gore) chose the former? Bush may be an abysmal candidate, but at least he's more honest about his awfulness than Gore is about his own.
Nader gave those of us who are opposed to capital punishment; opposed to corporate welfare; opposed to the unbridled corporate internationalism of NAFTA and the WTO; in favor of a clean environment; in favor of social programs that would alleviate poverty and thereby reduce crime— Nader gave us someone to vote for, rather than leaving us with no other choice than the "lesser of two evils." (And it is a real coin toss as to which of these two lessers is more evil.) Gore favors judicial killing; Gore's records on the environment looks good only in comparison to Bush's, and even then, Bush is at times more environmentally-friendly than Gore (Gore was the first Congressperson to seek, and get, a waiver against the EPA's endangered species act: thanks to Gore, foes of the environment have been getting them ever since and with far more ease); Gore favors NAFTA, the WTO, GATT; Gore favors such costly "defense" boondoggles as the missile defense system (Reagan's Star Wars for the 21st century)— the list goes on and on.
The differences between the Republicans and the Democrats are becoming increasingly insignificant— and it ain't because the Republicans are becoming more progressive. Nader represents a path the Democrats could have chosen to take rather than the one they actually did. Instead, the Democrats chose the path to the right, the path that made the Democrats nearly as Republican as the Republicans, the corporate-friendly path that led them to that special room in the White House from which telephone calls demanding that the Democrats, too, get their share of soft money "donations" are made. (Calls made by Gore, of course.)
To the Democrats' dismay, along came somebody, Nader, who has not abandoned principles and who cannot be bought. Panic! The Democrats might be able to convince those who aren't already too fed up to bother voting that they are marginally better than Bush, but they know they can't do that when it comes to Nader. Hence the dirty tricks, the attacks, the threats— hence, in short, the more complete adoption of the Republican playbook...including the adoption of Nixon's "Enemies List," at the top of which, now, is Ralph Nader's name.
To be sure, there are marginal differences between Gore and Bush on some issues; and in most cases (though not all), it is Gore who is slightly more progressive. But the differences are largely insignificant— the difference between someone who would shoot the poor in the head and hope they die quickly and someone who is content to inflict any old kind of wound, painful or not...as long as it is fatal.
A test of the actual substantive differences between the Republicans and the Democrats is being compiled even now, as I write this. Bush's controllers are already sedulously constructing a scenario to test Democratic resolve, a test comparable to testing a snowball's survival chances in hell.
Thus we see Bush, rather than trying to unite the country around non-partisan (and qualified) cabinet appointees, has been making, as expected, absolutely horrible choices for cabinet posts— Ashcroft, Whitman, Norton, Powell, as well as recently-withdrawn labor-exploiter and tax cheat Chavez— appointments that Gore, had he won, would almost certainly never have made. The Democrats, who indisputably have the votes to block these appointments— the Senate is 50-50 (with the tie-breaker going to Cheney), but the Democrats would need a mere 41 votes for a cloture-proof filibuster— are running around as though confirmation were a mere formality...which it will be if they allow it to.
In all likelihood, the Democrats will allow all of these horrendous appointees to be confirmed, and then deny they could have done anything about it. It's off to the memory hole again, along with all the other previous memories of the Democrats' pusillanimous abandonment of principle. And if Bush gets these appointments, it surely will embolden him when it comes time to name a Supreme Court justice. Expect another Thomas; expect another Scalia; and expect the Democrats to allow it to happen. To stop it would take courage; it would take commitment to principle; it would take daring...and there just are not enough Democrats who have these qualities. Bush's controllers obviously feel the Democrats will not put up a meaningful fight; and they're probably right.
If the Democrats fail this test, and they surely will, Bush's controllers will undoubtedly feel free to run roughshod over the country that did not vote for them, mandate or no. And the Democrats will let them, just as they allowed Reagan to do in the 1980s. (Al Gore was one of Reagan's most eager Democratic facilitators during the 1980s, it should be noted.)
Perhaps the saddest part for the Democratic party is that there still are worthy Democrats— Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson leap to mind as two obvious and largely admirable examples— but the future of the Democratic party, thanks to the likes of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, will belong to people like Jon Corzine, the just-elected freshman senator from New Jersey, who defeated his Republican opponent by outspending him exponentially: Corzine spent $70 million on his campaign compared to his opponent Franks' $2 million (the previous record for a Senate seat was held by Michael Huffington, a Republican who spent $30 million and lost). But Corzine could afford it. He came straight from a CEO job on Wall Street. He's a mega-millionaire. He's business-friendly. He certainly would not want to have big money taken out of campaigning. In short, he'd have made a great Republican.
Just as Gore, Lieberman and Clinton have.
You also will not hear from the Democrats that one of the reasons they lost this past election has to do with the exploding prison population. The population of U.S. prisons has increased by about a third under Clinton/Gore (the U.S. prison population as a percentage of the U.S. population as a whole far exceeds all other industrialized countries, and, indeed, almost all countries, be they First, Second or Third World)< http://www.cjcj.org/punishingdecade/punishing.html>. Prisoners— largely and disproportionately minority; usually poor— come from a demographic that votes overwhelmingly Democratic. Votes from the current population of today's U.S. prisons alone would have been enough to sweep Gore into office in what would have passed for a landslide. But it gets worse. In 9 states— Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Iowa, Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming— ex-felons are ineligible to vote ever again. They lose this "right" permanently. (In Florida (and probably elsewhere, too), countless non-felons— people convicted of misdemeanors as well as people who were never convicted of anything— were incorrectly classified as ex-felons and deprived of their right to vote along with the actual ex-felons.) When you include the number of ex-felons who have lost the right to vote permanently in the count of potential Democratic voters, the Gore "landslide" would have been even larger.
So who made it so that felons and ex-felons cannot vote? Not Ralph Nader, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the Democrats— desperately seeking a scapegoat— were to try to pin this on him, too. Was it the Republicans? Yes, in part. Along with the Democrats. (But do not, of course, expect to hear the Democrats admit this last part.)
Long ago, the Democrats abandoned the philosophy that the best way to combat crime as a social pathology was to try to prevent it before it happened. Where do we see the most crime? Or, to amend that, where do we see the most crime that actually gets prosecuted? (The answer to the question as originally posed would probably have to be "in the corporate boardrooms and the corridors of power in DC," but the U.S. has made a political decision not to punish those criminals. This is why Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan can still be seen on Nightline rather than as the pitcher/catcher battery for the prison's seniors baseball team.)
Quite simply, most crime occurs where poverty is the most extreme. It is impossible to deny the correlation between the twin social pathologies of poverty and crime. That poverty is one of the major causes of this crime is virtually irrefutable— it is as close to sociological fact as anything has ever been. To note this is not to excuse the crime, or hand a "get out of jail free" card to those who commit crimes. Rather, it is to say that if the concern for eliminating or reducing crime is a real; if the desire to prevent poor and minority youth from going to prison in record numbers is genuine— then effective steps must be taken to eliminate the conditions under which crime flourishes. That means attacking poverty rather than the poor themselves.
But attacking the poor themselves is easier if all you are really concerned with is scoring political points...or trying to prevent being scored against. When Bill Clinton went back to Arkansas during his 1992 campaign to oversee the judicial killing of convicted murderer Rickey Ray Rector, he did so explicitly so that he would not be "Willie Hortoned" by George Bush. (It should be noted that the person who first made Horton a race-baiting issue in the 1988 campaign was none other than Al Gore. W's father took it up later, after Gore withdrew and Dukakis became the Democratic candidate.) Clinton had to "look tough on crime", and his chosen way of doing so was to stage a lynching of a black man as a media event. (Rector himself was so profoundly brain damaged that he actually saved some of the dessert from his last meal "for later." He had no comprehension of what was about to happen to him.)
Poor kids from the slums do not choose to deal (or take) drugs because they have a genetic predisposition to do so; they do it because it is often the only realistic avenue of escape from the conditions that surround them. It is despair and a lack of attainable alternatives that contribute strongly to this behavior; and it is an unforgiving penal system that throws the poor— and only the poor— in jail as soon as they are caught engaging in this criminal behavior. Use or deal crack in North Philadelphia and expect to be sentenced to a long stretch in prison by the time you reach adulthood...assuming you survive that long. But you can take or deal powder cocaine, drive drunk, get barely passing grades throughout school and still get into the best colleges in the country— but wait, there's more!— and even become the President of the United States without even going through the formality of winning the election...if you're a scion of the family Bush.
The Democrats, noting that the Republican crime-fighting strategy of kill-'em-all-and-let-god-sort-'em-out seemed to be a political winner, quickly adopted that philosophy as their own. Clinton/Gore defunded social programs aimed at the prevention of crime to pay for programs that would increase prisons; Clinton/Gore made sure sentences for minorities and the poor became harsher and that discretion on the severity of the sentences was removed from the courtroom and made mandatory; Clinton/Gore made it next to impossible, with their "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act", for innocent people, the wrongly convicted, to appeal to the federal courts to overturn unjust sentences. (This act, and other Clinton/Gore "anti-crime" laws, made it possible for the Texas state courts to affirm that, e.g., an attorney who slept throughout the trial of his client was still effective counsel, and therefore it was perfectly legal and just for George W. Bush to have that client judicially murdered. The federal courts, which before Clinton/Gore would have had the authority to overturn such a miscarriage of justice, were prevented from intervening. Texas justice exists in large part because Al Gore and Bill Clinton gave Bush the go-ahead to impose it.)
When Pat Buchanan came on the Today show and agreed that those disputed votes in Florida were almost certainly not meant for him, and, what's more, said he did not want any votes that he did not earn, he showed far more principle than Gore supporters, who still insist that Nader's votes belong to Gore; he also showed more genuine principle than Gore himself did when Gore claimed the reason he was fighting for a hand recount in Florida was based on principle— if, Gore declaimed, they can take votes away from me this time, who will be next? That was the principle he professed to be fighting for: full enfranchisement.
Let us leave aside for the moment the Gore campaign's underhanded endeavors to disenfranchise Ralph Nader (by colluding with the Republicans to exclude him and Buchanan from the debates, among other dirty and cowardly tactics) and also to disenfranchise all who would even think of voting for Nader— and merely ask...where were Al Gore and his "principles" when these very same minority voters (in Florida and other states) were having their votes discarded in previous elections? We know this happened routinely; we know it happened almost exclusively to poor and minority voters. Why is it that high-minded principle failed to kick in for Al Gore until having those minority votes counted would have given him an election? Is this mere happenstance...or typical Democrat hypocrisy? Democratic doublethinkers want you to believe it is a coincidence— and it has been my experience that only Democratic doublethinkers believe that. Everyone else sees it for the political opportunism it blatantly is.
Governor Ryan of Illinois, a Republican and formerly a proponent of capital punishment, declared a moratorium on judicial killing in his state when it was made clear to him that innocent people were being convicted and nearly killed. During a period of time when Illinois executed 12 death row inmates, an addition thirteen death row inmates were found to have been wrongly convicted and were released after years of living under the threat of execution— some saved almost literally at the last minute. These last-minute reprieves notwithstanding, some innocent people probably were executed in Illinois and elsewhere. (Certainly they were in Texas.) Ryan took the bold step of declaring a moratorium in his state, while others, Democrat and Republican alike, claimed that the release of the thirteen "proved the system worked." (These apologists for state-sponsored killing conveniently overlooked the fact that most of these people got reprieves due to the efforts of activists from outside the killing system.)
But Al Gore and Bill Clinton proudly and boastfully expanded the number of federal crimes punishable by death by 60— and included some non-lethal crimes in this unprecedented expansion. Bill Clinton, given the opportunity to commute the sentence of federal death row prisoner Juan Raul Garza before leaving office, decided merely to postpone the execution for six months...at which point Bush will be in office and will be making the ultimate decision. Clinton left a human being's fate up to the serial-killing Texas governor whom he and Al Gore helped create and empower; Clinton has "progressed", in eight years, from doing his own killing to letting others do the dirty work.
What does it say about the state of the Democratic party when their leaders need to learn lessons in compassion and principled behavior from the likes of a Republican governor (Ryan) and a perennial Nazi sympathizer like Pat Buchanan?
What it means, in short, is that to be a Democrat increasingly means Republicanism by other means...or, often, by the same means, only harsher and with less honesty about the cruelty involved. The Democrats will deny this and unleash their doublethink dogs on anyone who dares point it out, as Nader did. But they won't apologize for it. After all...being a Democrat means never having to say you're sorry.