Old Joe; Dirty Sanchez

The aftermath of Al Gore's Lieberman pick produced a Shagbag Extravaganza. I've always objected to the NAACP, which uses its history as a (noble) nonpartisan civil rights organization to fob off what is basically an (ignoble) extreme partisan Democratic agenda. Last week, Joe Alcorn, head of the Dallas branch of the N-Dubble-Ay, emerged from the 11th century to unload on Joe Lieberman: "If we get a Jew person, then what I'm wondering is, I mean, what is this movement for, you know?" Alcorn said. "So I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do, you know, with money and these kinds of things." Right after that, NAACP head Kweisi Mfume "indefinitely suspended" Alcorn.

Well, good for him. A nice thing about Gore picking Lieberman is that it makes people realize that group loathing is a filthy thing. But what's wrong with the NAACP is that it has too little loathing for group loathing. They just get embarrassed when they're caught doing it. Mfume himself has engaged in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink game of cozying up to Louis Farrakhan, even speaking of his "covenant" with America's most renowned anti-Semite. Generally the NAACP considers Republicanism a bigger sin than anti-Semitism; the last national figure Mfume ousted was the former Virginia head of the N-Dubble-Ay. What did he do wrong? He announced publicly that he might be inclined to support Republican ex-Gov. George Allen over the incumbent Democrat in this fall's Virginia Senate race.

Still, Alcorn's rant was not the worst thing said about Lieberman last week. The true Shagbag laurels must go to Michael Lerner of Tikkun, who wrote, "The rest of us have a deeper concern. Joseph Lieberman is likely to accelerate the process in which the two major parties seem to be merging into one pro-business, pro-wealthy, elitist and morally tone-deaf governing force. Joseph Lieberman will also give greater prominence to the tendency in the Jewish world to subordinate values and spiritual goals to self-interest and material success."

Sound familiar? This is Joe Alcorn's tirade exactly, only translated out of Dallas black dialect into something more "thoughtful"-sounding. Could this, by the way, be the "new politics of meaning" that Hillary Clinton lauded Lerner for proposing a few years back? Maybe someone should ask her.

Before leaving what Joe Alcorn would call the Jew topic: I've never thought that the case for Patrick Buchanan's anti-Semitism was as strong as it was made out in the mainstream press. But the case for his scariness toward all Americans is considerably stronger than it's been presented in the mainstream press. The evening after he nominated Ezola Foster as his vice-presidential candidate, he promised us, "You don't know this peasant army." No we don't, do we? But the two luckiest things about America are that (a) it has no peasants and (b) it has no people who aspire to be peasants, as Buchanan so bizarrely does. The whole point of Thomas Jefferson's praise of the "yeoman farmer" is that said yeoman was meant to be an alternative political base to the peasant. That was the big break from European governance. Yeomen imply a republic; a peasantry implies a dictatorship or theocracy. Are there any two English words that are more terrifying in their apposition than "peasant" and "army"? I've just been reading Blaise de Monluc's Commentaires on the French wars of religion. Hey! Lotta stuff about peasant armies in there! Like: "And thenne wee didde enter the towne, and finding it full of Infidels didde hang seventie small children from Ye Hanging Tree in the Village Square, creating a Graunde Incentive for Ye Faythe."

Dirty Sanchez The best thing you can say about Joe Lieberman is that his reputation for religiosity and morals has improved the Democratic Party, willy-nilly. Democrats canceled the Hispanic Unity USA fundraiser they'd scheduled for convention week at Hugh Hefner's mansion. This followed a dramatic moment when Al Gore threatened to ax Loretta Sanchez from her convention speaking slot if she insisted on attending the fete. Gore didn't want to do this. There are perfectly good reasons for the Dems to hold a fundraiser at the Playboy mansion. First, Christie Hefner is one of their most generous donors and networkers. Second, the spank-magazine industry has become, since the Lewinsky affair, the investigative-enforcement arm of the Democratic Party. Granted, it was Larry Flynt, not Hugh Hefner, who scored the major triumph in this regard, producing the head of never-to-be-House-Speaker Bob Livingston of Louisiana. But there remain a lot of unanswered questions from that period. Like, how much did the Porn Kings know about Newt Gingrich's affair with a twentysomething staffer? Did they make contact with him? Threaten him? It would be worth asking him about this.

Gore canceled the fundraiser because you can't travel around the country bragging about your runningmate's religious and moral Orthodoxy while simultaneously shaking a cup in front of the wanking industry. "Decent people can differ" on stuff like abortion. But there ain't much disagreement, among that portion of Americans who claim to like what Lieberman offers morally, about marrying the Democratic Party to a porn-and-blackmail operation.

That's not the only way Lieberman has made the Democrats a much better party. Just as the porno trade is the Dems' investigative arm, the trial lawyers have in recent years provided its legislative one. They're the biggest source of constitutional corruption the party has. And, perhaps without thinking about it, Gore has picked the most trial-lawyer-unfriendly politician his party has. Lieberman probably didn't seek this role; it comes from the fact that the interests of Connecticut's insurance industry and those of the tort lawyers who bankroll the Dems are diametrically opposed. The left is attacking Lieberman for being in the back pocket of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. That's the thing one ought to like most about him!

Before leaving what Joe Lieberman would call the moral topic, there were a lot of articles about George Bush's execution of the mental-defective Oliver David Cruz (IQ: 63) last week. These pieces?particularly the ones in The New York Times?were meant to convey the impression that we could thwart the moral barbarism of capital punishment by putting Al Gore in the White House. But did one of them see fit to mention that executions of retards are something of a bipartisan craze? I mean, could we maybe have some mention of Ricky Ray Rector, the guy Gov. Clinton traveled back to Arkansas to pull the switch on, and who stuck the pie from his last meal in his pants pocket "for later"? The Times may be angry that capital punishment hasn't come up in this campaign. But if it hasn't come up, it's because pro-capital-punishment Al Gore hasn't seen fit to mention it.

I'll tell you something, though. Those Clintons can really campaign. The President unleashed one of the greatest political lines I've ever heard in my life last week at a campaign appearance in Virginia. "If you want to keep living like a Republican," he said, "you're gonna have to keep voting Democrat."