warning!! -- Horowitz content below -- warning!! =================================== PREPARE FOR POLITICAL WAR, GOPERS New York Post-Tuesday, November 14, 2000 By ROD DREHER e-mail: <dreher@nypost.com> EXUDING a Strangelovian calm, Al Gore declared to the media yesterday that he would commit the political equivalent of bombing Florida back to the Stone Age. With skin-crawling unctuousness, Gore mewled that this election wasn't about him, but about "our democracy." And he said he wouldn't want to win "by a few votes cast in error or misinterpreted or not counted." MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews heard in the veep's deceptively mild words a declaration of total war. "He has escalated this thing all the way," a stunned Matthews said, explaining that Gore appears prepared to fight for an extraordinary revote in Palm Beach County. Will the Republicans at long last realize that they're battling extremely clever berserkers who will do anything - anything - to win? Haven't they been paying attention for the past eight years? Ex-radical-turned-neoconservative David Horowitz, a Bush adviser whose most recent book is "The Art of Political War," is sickened and astonished by what he's seeing unfold in Florida. "What Al Gore has done by unleashing the dogs of political war here is the most irresponsible act of a political leader in my lifetime," Horowitz said. "What they're doing is delegitimating the next government. Once the traditional order has broken down, it's all against all." Conservatives have waged the Florida war less well than the left, said Horowitz, because they are temperamentally ill-suited for scorched-earth political combat. Believing, "If only one side is shooting, the other side will soon be dead," Horowitz is trying to teach the guerrilla warfare he learned on the ramparts of the radical left to his new allies on the right. "I always feel ambivalent as an ex-leftist teaching Republicans bad manners," Horowitz said. "But the reality is, when there is no referee, when the gloves are off, you have to beat them back by similar methods." The left took the propaganda initiative yesterday, organizing "nonpartisan" demonstrations around the country. Yesterday's relatively small event in downtown New York was a pro-Gore media bonanza, thanks largely to a brief appearance by Hollywood liberal Alec Baldwin. With the cameras rolling, unreconstructed Sixties radical Todd Gitlin, see-no-evil Clinton loyalist Rep. Jerrold Nadler and others upchucked the most fraudulent oratory since the last time Gore opened his mouth. They quoted the Declaration of Independence. They invoked patriots of yore. They recalled the civil-rights movement. A rabbi even likened their struggle to that of the Israelites escaping Pharaoh, headed to the Promised Land. Meanwhile, in an attempt to present a neutral face to the viewers at home, an organizer tried to get people hoisting openly pro-Gore signs (including a lovely one calling for the decapitation of Gov. Bush) to stifle it. The demo was a sparsely attended crock, but it made for effective TV. Once again, clueless conservatives are allowing themselves to get clobbered on the propaganda front. "We should have had demonstrations in the streets saying this is a political coup d'etat, and we have to defend the Constitution," said Horowitz. "And we should have been doing it first. But Republicans don't go into the streets. We're not about mob rule." True. But the ruthless Democrats aren't giving them a choice. So far, it looks like Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who is holding Democrats to the letter of the law by forcing counties to have all their votes certified by today at 5 p.m., is the only Republican willing to play hardball by the Dems' rules. Team Gore is screaming bloody murder. Good. Harris is doing her job. "Politically, it is better to be seen as a peacemaker than as a warmonger," Horowitz writes in his book. "But it is not always possible. If forced to fight, then fight to win."
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