I picked up the National Edition of the LA Times yesterday to see what
it had to say about the choice of Lieberman and what do I find but a
column by Bob Scheer attacking Gore's choice but for the wrong reasons:
that Lieberman "betrayed" Clinton.
Scheer, for those who don't remember, was one of the leading voices
against the Vietnam War in the SF Bay Area, and even ran for Senate. He
edited Ramparts during its glory days. He was an early supporter of the
Panthers and lived in a communal household with Tom Hayden, unsubtlely
called, "The Red Family." Since those days he has drifted toward the
center, accompanied by a cushy salary from the LA Times, as an op-ed
writer, and as an interviewer for Playboy. Since Clinton's election, he
has become an unapologetic PR man for the White House, managing to
overlook all those issues which would have engaged and enraged the
Scheer of the Sixties.
Scheer, far more pernicious and dangerous than his old colleague at
Ramparts, David Horowitz, and no less a sell-out, writes that Lieberman
should be "boasting about the record of the Clinton-Gore years...The
fact is, Clinton has been a great president, presiding over eight years
of unprecedented prosperity and progress towards world peace."
This from someone who has completely expunged the radical past from his
web site (the past which led to the position where he could sell his
soul to the LA Times and could even afford to sleep in the Brooks
Brothers fashions he is never seen without).
In differing with Scheer on Clinton's record, I don't need, for this
list, to bring up the details of such domestic issues as so-called
welfare reform, the "effective death penalty and counter-terrorism act"
which has been the highlight of the greatest attack on our civil
liberties by any recent president, the elevation of incarceration levels
through the phony anti-drug war, and the trade agreements and support of
merger-mania which has widened the gap between rich and poor to
third-world proportions, nor to the international issues such as the
genocidal sanctions against Iraq and the promotion of the Star Wars
missile program that threatens to escalate the tensions between the US
and Russia and China, etc.
Actually, I just remembered that Sweet Old Bob (or just the initials, as
I prefer) interviewed Nixon before he died or perhaps he was writing
immediately afterward, but then, too, he praised Nixon as one of
America's great presidents.
Jeff Blankfort
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