Radicals Ditch Gore; The First Gay President?

This time, in his influential column in the Brattleboro Reformer, Marty has shifted. He's no longer telling the radicals to do the sober thing. Tacitly (no one likes to admit career error), he's indicating that a vote for Nader is okay. Pushing Jezer toward this posture is the fact that Vermont's radicals are finally getting over their long infatuation with the loudmouthed opportunist, self-aggrandizer and self-styled "independent socialist" Bernie Sanders and have seen him for what he is, a Democratic hack politician. Sanders used to be the candidate of the Progressive Coalition, which has now become a third party, the Progressives, of which Sanders is not a member. The party already has four reps in Vermont's Statehouse as well as any number of elected people at the local level. This time around it has a slate of statewide candidates including Anthony Pollina, who is aiming to unseat Democratic governor Howard Dean.

Not being a hypocrite, Marty Jezer can scarcely tout the Progressive Party and still urge Gore over Nader. The latter came to Vermont last week and pulled in 600 at a meeting in Brattleboro, an incredible turnout for this small Vermont town. Nader promptly denounced Sanders as a sellout, and of course this made headlines, though the Reformer's reporter didn't have the nerve to call the notoriously edgy and bullying Sanders to ask for a comment.

Now, Vermont is scarcely a major factor in the presidential race if you rate it in terms of Electoral College votes, of which it has three. But across the country right now, in many states that are in close play?Michigan, for example?there are plenty of people like Jezer who, as it comes down to the wire, are taking their final look at Gore and deciding that hell no, they won't go into the Democratic column on polling day.

No surprise. What possible reason did Gore offer in his first debate to those left-progressives to go his way? Like Bush, Gore suffers from exposure. He should shun the public stage, since he's evidently incapable of mounting a podium without firing off a couple of stretchers. In the normal order of things the American people have no problem with that. After all, they wagged their heads tolerantly when Ronald Reagan claimed that he personally liberated Auschwitz. But Gore's fibs play into a larger unease. The guy just doesn't hang together as a human being. Back in the Cold War the CIA used to promote the theory that the Soviet Union's troubles could be traced to the habit of swaddling babies. Thus constricted in their early years, Russians never learned the habits and motions of free people. Same thing with Al. Something happened to him in his early years that messed him up for life.

In a column in Salon last week Camille Paglia had a swing at the problem. She was discussing Al and Tipper's kiss at the Democratic convention and suggested that it may have been an effort to counter any speculations about Gore's sexual preferences, in connection with a longtime supporter: "My first thought," Paglia wrote, "was that there would now be some ostentatious heterosexual display by the candidate at the convention. But I certainly didn't expect it to be on the podium on the formal occasion of the acceptance speech?which I think both Gores degraded by their frat-house smooching. Gore isn't gay, but his hothouse upbringing by his dominating parents probably produced his prissy, lisping Little Lord Fauntleroy persona, which borders on epicene. Like Hillary Clinton, Gore appears to have a slightly amorphous and wavering gender identity that draws gay admirers, who platonically worship in elite coteries of Byzantine secrecy. It's well established that Gore has a problem relating to average, heterosexual guys, who are leaning toward Bush."

Like Paglia, I don't think Gore is a closeted shirt-lifter, though my colleague here, John Strausbaugh, espouses that view. But Gore certainly gives the impression sometimes of being under psychic duress, like a closet case from the 50s, though the closet in Gore's instance is not necessarily sexual preference, but a life span of hypocrisy, of which his dope-smoking and subsequent punitive attitude toward nonviolent drug offenders is a major example.

Bush is just as messed up, and people know that too. Hence these flipflops in the polls. I'd have to bet still that Gore will squeak through, notwithstanding the thoughts noted above, and indeed I wagered another grand on the issue with John Fund at the New York Press party last Friday, even though I pray with every fiber of my being that the Nader vote will bring Gore down, and though I am selling Al Gore: A User's Manual, by Jeffrey St. Clair and myself, which definitively lays out all the reasons not to vote for Al. If you want to hear our arguments firsthand, come to the Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square S., this Thurs., Oct. 12, at 7 p.m., where Jeffrey and I will be discussing "The Evils of Two Lessers."

The NYT & Wen Ho Lee I wrote here a couple of weeks ago that The New York Times' onslaught on Wen Ho Lee, accused of stealing H-secrets for the Chinese, was one of the worst episodes in journalistic history. The Times obviously felt bad about the whole business, since it ran a couple of editorial comments, some 3300 words in overall length, admitting lack of oversight, plus overstatement and omission. All in all it was as good a climb-down as we're going to get. On the matter of Wen Ho Lee there is something more to be said, and my friend Jeffrey Blankfort of San Francisco put it well: "One of the unmentionables concerning the case of Wen Ho Lee, who was clearly the target of racial profiling, was what Mr. Lee did for a living. But leave it to that defender of freedom and the flag, the L.A. Times' overpaid contributing editor and syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, to point this out, or not quite point it out, in fact, but to only hint what Wen Ho Lee's business was, namely the participation in the making of atomic weapons at Los Alamos Laboratory, which is clearly one of the centers of evil in the uncivilized world. Here's what Scheer wrote in a [recent] column in the San Francisco Examiner which, presumably, has been also published in the L.A. Times: 'For 20 years, Taiwan-born Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee had labored to make his adopted country strong, and instead of the government's gratitude, he endured its wrath.' This is the same Scheer who once wrote an anti-nuclear book, 'With Enough Shovels,' but who now appears ready to accept the Nixon-Reaganite notion of 'peace through strength,' and that atomic weapons are a legitimate way to pursue that philosophy. Personally, while I am clearly against the singling out of Lee simply because he is Chinese in origin, I have no more sympathy for him as a man than I would have had for a German rocket scientist."

War Criminal Sharon The day after Ariel Sharon staged his entry onto Temple Mount with 1000 Israeli soldiers at his back, thus provoking the ensuing bloodshed and slaughter of Palestinians, The Washington Post's Jerusalem reporter called him a "portly old warrior." Hmmm. "Himmler, the portly old chicken breeder"? From Leah Garchik's column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 6: "John Burke was struck by this week's statement by Israeli Police Minister Shlomo Ben Ami blaming Arab parents for bringing their children to the frontlines, endangering them 'deliberately.' Just last week, writes Burke, he read in The New Yorker the diary of Romanian Mihail Sebastian, who was in Budapest through World War II. On Sept. 20, 1939, Sebastian quotes an 'ex-friend,' the writer Mircea Eliade, criticizing the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. Only Jews, said the pro-German, 'are capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the German's sense of scruple.'"