On Politics: When The Man Deceives: A Video For Destruction (Part 1)

A couple of weeks ago, during a conversation I was having with someone I love, I completely caved in: I crumbled under peer pressure. It is not the sort of thing I confess lightly; there is an element of shame to it all. But confess it I must, because I was lying, not only to my interlocutor, but to myself. 

The topic was Mr. Al Gore. I had made the point that Mr. Gore has built something of a mythology around his life's work: he has pointed out dangers that threaten us all, and yet he, blithely and blindly, is part of those very dangers. If Al Gore warns us of global warming, he does so from the Cannes Film Festival, the yacht-littered theater orgy of the world's richest and most indulgent polluters. If he warns us of corporate control of information, he does so without telling us that he sits† on the boards of Google and CurrentTV, both of which "control" more information in an hour than Rupert Murdoch "controls" in a month or perhaps even in a decade. And if he warns us of the great threat that unreason has on our culture, he does so in a manner that can only be described as fallacious. 

In short, Mr. Gore is a dangerous man. 

But it was exactly that assertion which I denied. I had made a fairly decent case about Mr. Gore's hypocrisy without once referring to his negative and harmful influence on the culture at large; but those listening to me construed that I was averring that Mr. Gore was a man capable of doing much harm. Alas, as quickly as a cocksure disciple slinking past an accuser in a Jerusalem street, I denounced my own convictions. 

Surely, there is no pride in such cowardice. 

Mr. Gore, 1992, Waxing Eloquent About Saddam Hussein

Contratimes readers will know that I have spent much time pointing out that the current war in Iraq is not four-and-a-half years old. It is at least 16 years old. There has not been one second since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait that the United States has not been in political and military strife with Iraq. Moreover, easily forgotten is that it was the Clinton administration that ramped up sanctions and military operations against Saddam Hussein from 1992 through January 2001 (when Messrs. Clinton and Gore left Washington). Lastly, it was during the Clinton administration, and due to Mr. Clinton's perceived abuses of Iraq, that Osama bin Laden issued his infamous 1998 fatwa, the one that led to the 9/11 atrocities. And the media, by and large, are silent about these issues: the media, nearly all of whom are, to some degree, Clinton fans and Gore idolizers, will not permit themselves to see what they helped create.

Now comes an incredible video from YouTube (originally broadcast on C-Span). The time is September 1992. Mr. Gore is the Democratic nominee for vice president; he's on the campaign trail. The video captures him at his pedantic, professorial, condescending best. But what is the topic? That's right: George H. W. Bush, Bush the First, was NOT TAKING SADDAM HUSSEIN SERIOUSLY ENOUGH. Bush the First was capitulating; Bush was weak and duplicitous; Bush was trying to appease a terrorist.

Of course, Al Gore and Bill Clinton would be tough and bold; they would sanction and subdue Saddam Hussein; they would finish the job that should have been completed in the First Gulf War.

In other words, Bill Clinton and Al Gore would stir up a hornet's nest.

I beg you: Watch the video yourself, and then write to me of my cowardly denials. And then write to the world, and tell them that you do not know Al Gore. 

Peace.

†Google is not merely a search engine: Google is also GMAIL, Google News, Blogger and YouTube. Mr. Gore also serves the board of Apple Inc.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved. 

¶ Of The Day

A new Contratimes feature? Maybe. But today I submit the first ever Paragraph, or ¶, of the Day.

Check this out from today's Washington Post editorial, "Congress's Iraq Quagmire":

ON TUESDAY nearly every member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warmly endorsed Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, and a number wished him success or "Godspeed" in his mission. Yesterday some of the same senators voted for a resolution that opposes the increase of troops for Gen. Petraeus's command -- even though the general testified that he could not accomplish his mission without the additional forces and hinted that such a resolution could encourage the enemy. Such is the muddle of Congress on Iraq: A majority may soon go on record opposing the new offensive in Baghdad even while encouraging the commander who leads it. [Emphasis added solely to incite incredulity everywhere]

Such fun!

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

A Little Perspective

When judging something -- anything -- it is often beneficial to have a point of reference. So, in the interest of aiding the reader's judgment of terrorism, I supply this photograph from my archives. It shows what 9 pounds of dynamite placed on a bus look like fractions of a second after detonation. Click on the picture for a larger view. It is quite revealing. And then think of a terrorist's bomb on a London double-decker.

It is worth noting that the types of explosives used in terrorism are viciously more volatile than dynamite.

What a sad world.

©2005/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

[Fear not, the bus was empty. This still image was taken for a news story about the filming of a low-budget movie. The detonation was shot at 1/500th of a second, f/5.6, on Ektachrome 100 film. 400mm lens, Canon A2; tripod. Distance: 100 yards. For you photo geeks out there.]

We Are All Londoners

Today London grieves, only 24 hours after celebrating its winning bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. Terrorists have reportedly brought a different torch to that city, igniting a different cauldron. Shame on them.

According to reports, Islamic extremists are now warning Denmark and Italy to consider their own fates; and to bow before the almighty sword of Allah.

Yes, the G8 summit is occurring now, in Scotland. The summit's focus is on aid to Africa and global environmental issues. But the G8 agenda, important as it is, is meaningless in a world where the environment is polluted by people who perform acts of unconscionable terror with cheer. Moreover, why worry about air pollution when there are people who aim to prevent us from breathing at all?

And by us, I mean the Euro-, Anglo-, American-centric West. I am talking about the people who read this essay; who live and move about in the civilized world. We are, as this blog repeatedly reminds us, targets. And we are targets because of who we are, not merely, or even largely, because of what we do.

The difference between the West and our Muslim accusers is simple to define: We do not flood the streets in celebration upon a military victory. Does anyone think that the Americans are going to flood Ground Zero, guns raised, effigies burning, if Osama bin Laden is captured? Do you think we Western "crusaders" delight in burning people alive, dragging them through streets, and hanging their scorched corpses on bridges and then, for sheer fun, posing for pictures with the smell of burned flesh on our hands? Does the American military post on the web declarations of celebration every time a cruise missle finds its mark, telling the world, as terrorists did this morning, that our enemies should burn "with fear and terror, from north to south, east to west"?

This is what was found on the web this morning, posted, allegedly, by the London attackers:

"Rejoice, Islamic nation. Rejoice, Arab world. The time has come for vengeance against the Zionist crusader government of Britain in response to the massacres Britain committed in Iraq and Afghanistan ... The heroic mujahedeen carried out a blessed attack in London, and now Britain is burning with fear and terror, from north to south, east to west."

Nice!

I will say this: The worst thing the Islamic extremists can do is turn Europe against Islam. I mean that. It is the worst thing they can do. And they are just about to do it.

London and the rest of us have an Olympian task before us, simple in theory, but difficult in practice. We need to show our resolve, yes, but what we need to show is the superiority of our world. We need to win the propaganda war, proving that Osama bin Laden and his derivatives are pathetic, snivelling critics dripping with envy, and quivering with an unsated lust for power. We need to show that the world Osama bin Laden sought to trade at the World Trade Center is not a world that is worth a thing. We need to show the foolishness of terrorism, not by denouncing its violence, but declaring its impotence.

What more demonstrative proof of weakness has ever been shown to the world than 9/11? For on that day the West was attacked by airplanes created and sustained by the West; in a country so free even its enemies can walk through airports without so much as a question; on a day when travel was as easy as picking up the phone. Where are the Islamic plane-builders? And why, if Osama bin Laden is so strong, could he not attack with weapons his own superior world built for itself? Why steal ours, if not in admission of his abject impotency? Damn it, I guarantee you that every piece of technology used in London this morning was created by a Westerner. I know it in my bones. There is thus nothing strong in an ideology that is so weak it cannot fend for itself; or offend for itself.

But the Arabic world did indeed bring ONE thing to 9/11, and if you think about it, it makes one tremble. For there was a time, deep beneath Arabian sand, that the very oil used to thrust the jet engines into the Twin Towers once sat cool in the prehistoric darkness. In short, the oil of Arabia did start the whole thing tumbling down.

My liberal friends are right: THE WAR IS ALL ABOUT OIL -- the very oil that fell down on New Yorkers, scorching (as it did) horror-struck faces turned upward, mouths agape at the face of impotent evil.

Oil: the residue of dead carbon-based life forms. The residual blood of countless organisms, decayed beyond the millennia. Perhaps it's the blood of the Garden of Eden, long since dead.

Today, we are all Londoners. But London is not burning, and it is not falling down. It is a stalwart city in a stalwart nation, of historic resolve. It may quake, but it will not tumble.

I pray for London, just as I pray for peace in a world where peace refuses to come easy.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes

Is this a Double Standard?

[I offer deep and abiding gratitude to David Horowitz for featuring this essay at his website, Frontpagemag.com, in April.]

By the time the 1960's came to a close, I was in fourth grade, all of nine years old. I recall that the '60s scared me: that the Black Panthers, assassinations, riots, and even the epileptic screaming of Janice Joplin simply frightened me. Having been born in the middle of a war, I found Vietnam scary as well, though the allure of combat teased not only my imagination but the backyard play-fantasies of my New Jersey playmates (till I moved to New Hampshire in 1968). And there, in second grade, in what may have been my first gesture of bravado, I recall telling classmate Timmy Tyrrell, who already was planning on being a minister (his whole family was devoted to that goal), that I wanted to grow up to be a "heroin addict," a boast I completed with a pantomime of shooting up: arm on my desk, sleeve rolled up, pencil heading deep into my vein - and Mrs. Barden nearby. I would join the rebellion, I declared, and I'll have my hair as long as Rapunzel's.

Recently I've been reliving those times, in the trenchant and matter-of-fact analysis of David Horowitz' autobiography, Radical Son. It is a revealing book, prophetic in its disclosure, giving me an anchor for my wind-tossed anxieties about a decade deemed by some "the best of times."

I share this because I am more certain than ever that the causes for my anxiety have not been rebuffed or destroyed. The radicalism that pervaded the '60s remains, with the '60s youth now in places of political and social prominence, and their children and grandchildren, each breast fed on the idealized protestations of their '60s progenitors, now seeking their own Age of Aquarius. Horowitz reminds me of this, and though I am intellectually mature enough to rein in my emotion (most of the time), anxiety still wakes the soul at night. They are here.

They of course, are those who cannot and will not permit dissent from the party line that a "redemptive future", as Horowitz puts it, is possible; a future without poverty, inequality or any perceived injustice. This future is about emancipating humanity from the fears imposed by the Church; about liberating people from the incorporated capitalist greed bent on creating an unquenchable thirst in consumers; about tossing off the common sense shackles of sexual and artistic prudence.

Go back with me, for a moment, and relive the 1960s' radical beliefs about revolution in America. For example, relive the revolutionary conviction that criminals, particularly black ones, were really acting as liberators; that they were merely acting out as repressed people against an oppressive "system"; against "the Man." Recall that the Black Panthers were not merely victims, but liberators, fighting with clenched fist the classism and injustices of a tyrannical white enterprise. The Weather Underground, violent and aggressive; the property-smashing protesters in American university towns; even the Vietnamese communists exterminating the Party's transgressors; each of these received the compassion, mercy, even the all-out support, of American leftists from coast to coast. For these eruptive and confrontational movements, unavoidable according to Marxist-Hegelian theory, were allegedly symptomatic of a repressive, soon-to-die capitalist colossus.

So Horowitz tells in truly chilling detail and - with what cannot be described in any other phrase - he tells with nothing short of bravery. For Horowitz himself was a revolutionary, born into an American family of strident and organized Communists. But after decades of mounting a truly impressive assault on America with revolutionary zeal, Horowitz saw his ideals crumble into the realities of the gulags of the Soviet Union, and the failed socialist economies everywhere Marx was embraced.

Perhaps the single most important line in Horowitz' work is this, which he describes as the subtext for defending the left's moral failures: "No matter how bad my actions seem, my heart is in the right place." This defense, Horowitz argues, was deployed by leftists everywhere as they were confronted by the violent, murderous realities their actions and ideas supported.

It is an important line to remember.

THEY ARE HERE

Sunday, April 24, 2005, in typical fashion, Frank Rich of the New York Times writes of House Speaker Tom Delay that (and I quote Mr. Rich), "It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the 'left's last legislative body.'" One wonders what Mr. Rich means. It is never a "lie" to argue, no matter how one argues. It is a lie to deliberately tell a mistruth. Arguing is not lying. Lying is lying.

Here's Tom Delay's full remark: "And of course, the leftists hate it when we attack the left's last legislative body." That Delay is referring to the judiciary is inescapable. But that it is a lie is hardly accurate; nor is it an argument, as Rich wrongly suggests. If anything, it looks like an incontrovertible truth: it is transparent that the left indeed does hate it when Delay (and others of his ilk) attacks the judiciary. Just look at how the leftist media have reacted to his remarks. They've aimed their guns at him. He's a "liar."

I share this small item for a very important reason. It reveals that the left, embodied by Mr. Rich, is blind to its double standard.

That double standard is this: The left rarely, if ever, inquires why the right, particularly the religious right, is so disenchanted with "the system." Moreover, the right is never offered the rather easy out granted to the left: Tom Delay, for example, will never be acquitted for his 'lies' with the merciful "we disagree with Mr. Delay's actions and words, but his heart is in the right place."

No, Rich never inquires, and I believe he has never inquired, why Delay and his colleagues feel so outraged by the US judiciary. Or why conservatives feel "oppressed"; or why radical opponents of abortion (the few that exist) have taken up arms and shot abortion doctors. Are conservatives' hearts in the right place? Never!

That Mr. Rich (and virtually every leftist pundit in this country) has never granted such tolerant understanding of the right indicates the clear line of demarcation between the two political wings. Leftist writers are much more willing to discern the heart of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein than the person seated next to them on the train (unless that person be a member of MoveOn.org).

In Radical Son, Horowitz spells it out plainly for all to see. He recounts how the leftist media reacted to his defection from the left: with an onslaught of lies, vitriol and scorn. And he recalls how Garry Wills, protegé of right-wing William F. Buckley, was treated by the right when he defected for the left: He was treated like a human being deserved to be treated, with respect.

Horowitz also makes the claim that pundits of the left are expert in writing, not brilliant arguments, but brilliant indictments. Frank Rich's piece on Sunday, like most of his work, proves Horowitz' point. But Horowitz makes a more chilling claim, and I quote:

"Lenin said that the object of political debate was not to win a debate but to wipe one's opponent from the face of the earth."

Apparently Lenin and his distant relatives don't give a damn about whether one's heart is in the right place.

It's that sort of "understanding" of the revolutionary spirit that keeps me up at night.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.