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Funny thing about Al Gore—both the right and the left hate his guts. This fact was made tangible during the summer of 2000 when two exposés of Gore came out, one written by two conservatives and published by a right-wing house, the other written by two liberals and published by a left-wing house. What could inspire such bipartisan disdain? The answer is complicated, but basically Gore combines the worst traits of the left and the right while at the same time being an ethically bankrupt hypocrite who speaks with a forked tongue.
In the conservative exposé, Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore, authors David N. Bossie and Floyd G. Brown start with Gore’s roots. Though he likes to paint himself as a humble farmboy from Tennessee, Gore is actually part of “a Southern ruling class family. ”“Gore rarely, if ever, mentions how his relatives distinguished them-selves in politics, law, medicine, business, and literature since the seventeenth century.” After skillfully avoiding combat in World War II—even though he did everything he could to get the US into the war—Albert Gore Sr. became the protector of communist-capitalist billionaire Armand Hammer, mostly remembered as the owner of oil giant Occidental Petroleum. Hammer was known as “the Godfather of American corporate cor-ruption.”Gore Sr. was financially and politically rewarded for aiding this sleazy powerbroker, who laundered money and ran guns for Lenin and Stalin and helped the Soviet Union acquire US military t e c h n o l o g y. (The younger Al Gore would also do favors for and receive favors from this communist agent.) Gore Sr. ’s mostly crum-mylegacy in Congress has been whitewashed. Though he is now painted as a courageous fighter for racial justice, he admitted in his autobiography that he could not count himself as a hero of civil rights because he “let the sleeping dogs of racism lie as best I could.”
Gore Jr. likes to wax nostalgic about his days on the family farm Tennessee, but he never publicly waxes nostalgic about the fact that he actually spent three-quarters of his early life in Washington, DC, at a top-floor suite of the swank Fairfax Hotel being groomed for the presidency by a senator (his father) and a UN delegate (his mother). And he didn’t exactly attend a one-room schoolhouse in the sticks, instead going to the most elite prep school in Washington (and one of the most expensive in the entire country).
As Vietnam was raging, Gore debated long and hard about how to handle the situation. Thinking that dodging the draft would hurt his political future, he enlisted and was able to get a stateside assignment as a reporter. With seven months left in his two-year tour, Gore was sent to Vietnam, where he was a reporter in the rear echelon, who, unlike the front-line troops, “got to live in safe air-conditioned barracks, take hot showers, eat hot food, and take in Saigon night life...” Despite Gore’s 1988 claim that he did guard duty in the bush, “The closest Gore and [his journalist buddy Mike] O’Hara came to combat was to arrive at firebases hours or even days after a firefight.”
From 1971 to 1976, Gore plodded along, turning in mediocre perform-ances as a reporter, a divinity student, and a law student (he didn’t finish either course of study). He also smoked pot heavily, most witnesses claim, until 1972, although one former friend of his says Gore toked hash and opium-laced pot until he declared his candidacy for the House of Reps in 1976.
Once in the House, Gore purposely made a name for himself by taking on such popular but easy targets as poisonous baby food, toxic waste, and carcinogenic children’s pajamas. He was well known among his colleagues for hogging the spotlight and appearing on TV at every opportunity. “His fellow class of ‘76
Member and rival Richard Gephardt nicknamed Gore ‘Prince Albert’ for his constant preening before the cameras.”
He sat on the fence regarding the events in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It’s at this point that the authors’ conservative views become apparent. They criticize Gore for not supporting the Contras, which is bad or good depending on your political views. The fact that he tried to play both sides, though, should be troubling (but not surprising) to everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. The authors also take Gore to task for not supporting Reagan’s nuclear build-up and SDI, and later they lambaste him for supporting regulation and an end to the ban on gays and lesbians in the military.
Gore’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 was bankrolled by “Maryland millionaire real estate developer” Nathan Landow, who had personal and business associations with organized crime figures. Thanks to Gore’s dullness and micromanage-ment, he lost to Michael Dukakis, who then got his ass kicked by George Bush. It’s around this time that Gore began to forge his deep, mutually profitable ties to China.
During the campaign, Gore bragged to his Southern audiences that he had personally raised and sold tobacco. He told them that he supported tobacco subsidies. He also accepted money from tobacco PACs from 1979 to 1990. All of this despite the fact that his chain-smoking sister died an agonizing death from lung cancer in 1984. After the Clinton Administration declared war on the tobacco industry in the mid-1990s, Gore suddenly started using his dead sister as a teary-eyed political prop. He’s also done the same thing with his son, Albert III, who nearly died after being hit by a car in 1989.
In 2000 Gore declared that he never voted for anti-abortion legislation while he was in Congress, but this is a flat-out lie. In actuality, during his time in the House and Senate he voted against abortion “on 84% of all recorded roll call votes on the issue.... He spoke against abortion in recorded Congressional speeches and wrote against abortion in letters to many constituents.” He moved away from his pro-life stance after losing the nomination in 1988, and two weeks after being tapped for VP by Clinton in 1992, Gore miracu-lously became a full-fledged pro-choice feminist. (Kind of the mirror image of the way George Bush suddenly moved from supporting choice to opposing abortion around the same nanosecond that Reagan made him his running mate.)
Speaking of flip-flops, Gore broke with the Democratic leaders of the Senate to support the Persian Gulf War. In a January 1991 speech, trying to minimize his alienating stance, he declared that the goal of the war should be to expel Iraq from Kuwait, not to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. However, three
months later, Gore started pillorying President Bush for not pressing into Iraq, protecting the Kurds, and overthrowing Hussein. He com-pared Bush to Stalin for doing exactly what Gore had pushed for that January.
Naturally, Gore is famous for giving lip service to the environment. His actions tell a different story, though. He has been an active pro-ponent of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has built numerous dams and nuclear reactors. “His Tennessee farm was strip-mined for zinc by three different companies, one of them A r m a n d Hammer’s mining subsidiary.” He even flails his arms about over-population though he and Tipper churned out four kids. But in 1989, Gore suddenly became an eco-warrior, penning Earth in the Balance, which completely buys into the myths and failed predic-tions of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and even compares society’s treatment of the earth to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust. Even into 2000, Gore said he completely stands by what he wrote, including the part about abolishing the internal combustion engine. He never has bothered to renounce his old ways, though. Unfortunately, the authors drop the ball here, failing to show that Gore has continued to help trash the environment since 1 9 8 9 . The other Gore exposé, discussed below, does cover this ground.
In 1992 Bill Clinton picked Al Gore as his running mate because Gore at least appeared to be an ethical family man who had experi-ence in Congress and was cherished by important leftist sectors, such as environmentalists who were bamboozled by Earth in the Balance. Gore became the most powerful VP in American history. One thing he did with his power was to throw all kinds of support at Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, a corrupt, mobbed-up incompetent who hurt not only Russia but also the US by allowing the Russian Mafia to do whatever it wanted, including stealing money from the IMF and extorting players in the NHL. “Incredibly enough, Gore continues to socialize with Chernomyrdin and to con-sult him for advice on Russian affairs.”
Prince A l b e r t gives a barebones outline of the fundraising scandals (particularly the Buddhist temple shakedown), in which Gore helped Chinese communist agents and high officials give millions of dollars to the Democratic National Committee in exchange for access to the President and the White House, America’s military technology secrets, and the President’s acquiescence in China’s bullying of Taiwan. In China in 1997, Gore raised his glass to toast Prime Minister Li Peng, the man who ordered the Tiananmen massacre, even though Gore had raked George Bush over the coals when two US officials had toasted Peng years earlier.
Likewise, the book quickly sketches some of Gore’s other conflicts of interest and potential scandals, such as uranium deals with Russia, the Teamsters election scam, and helping 5,000 felonious immigrants gain American citizenship so they would vote Democrat. There’s also some good info on the dirty dealings of Gore’s afore-mentioned close friend Nathan Landow, who tried to shake down the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe (whom he called “a bunch of goddamned uneducated Indians”) and pressured Kathleen Willey not to testify that Clinton had sexually touched her in the Oval Office. Of course, the authors also look at Gore’s defense of Clinton during the whole Lewinsky/impeachment quagmire.
The book ends with a look at the odd cast of characters that Gore brought onboard to run his 2000 campaign: a man who might be criminally indicted for shady dealings, a tobacco industry lobbyist, a race-baiter, people who specialize in slanderous attack ads, and his stealth advisor, Naomi Wolf, who wants to transform Gore into an “alpha male.”
In the end, Prince Albert is a serviceable look at Gore’s waffling, lies, and scandals. It suffers from leaden prose, and it should have con-centrated on Gore’s more recent escapades rather than spreading itself evenly but thinly over his whole life. Prince Albert occasionally misses the boat with regard to Gore’s unsavory activities. This might be because the authors are conservatives. I have to wonder if, for example, Gore’s ties to Big Oil are only given the barest attention because Bush and Cheney are also in Oil’s pocket.
No such problems with Al Gore: A U s e r’s Manual, though. Wr i t t e n by leftist muckrakers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair— who produce the excellent newsletter CounterPunch—this bookcalls Gore on all his bullshit. By doing so, it demonstrates that true, informed leftists also loathe Gore. Some of the brightest lights on the left have lit into Gore and/or Clinton: Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, James Ridgeway, Sam Smith, Cockburn and St. Clair, The Nation, Verso publishing, even Camille Paglia (who oxymoronically calls herself a “libertarian Democrat”). I find this fascinating since it shows such a clear dif-ference between the left and the right. Can you imagine a gallery of prominent conservative commentators and reporters attacking George W. Bush? Can you imagine a conservative publisher put-ting out an exposé of Bush written by two conservatives? It could never happen. Just why the left is willing to do this while the right would never do such a thing, except perhaps under torture, is a topic for another time. Right now, let’s look at what the CounterPunchers reveal about Gore.
*MORE TO COME*
In the conservative exposé, Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore, authors David N. Bossie and Floyd G. Brown start with Gore’s roots. Though he likes to paint himself as a humble farmboy from Tennessee, Gore is actually part of “a Southern ruling class family. ”“Gore rarely, if ever, mentions how his relatives distinguished them-selves in politics, law, medicine, business, and literature since the seventeenth century.” After skillfully avoiding combat in World War II—even though he did everything he could to get the US into the war—Albert Gore Sr. became the protector of communist-capitalist billionaire Armand Hammer, mostly remembered as the owner of oil giant Occidental Petroleum. Hammer was known as “the Godfather of American corporate cor-ruption.”Gore Sr. was financially and politically rewarded for aiding this sleazy powerbroker, who laundered money and ran guns for Lenin and Stalin and helped the Soviet Union acquire US military t e c h n o l o g y. (The younger Al Gore would also do favors for and receive favors from this communist agent.) Gore Sr. ’s mostly crum-mylegacy in Congress has been whitewashed. Though he is now painted as a courageous fighter for racial justice, he admitted in his autobiography that he could not count himself as a hero of civil rights because he “let the sleeping dogs of racism lie as best I could.”
Gore Jr. likes to wax nostalgic about his days on the family farm Tennessee, but he never publicly waxes nostalgic about the fact that he actually spent three-quarters of his early life in Washington, DC, at a top-floor suite of the swank Fairfax Hotel being groomed for the presidency by a senator (his father) and a UN delegate (his mother). And he didn’t exactly attend a one-room schoolhouse in the sticks, instead going to the most elite prep school in Washington (and one of the most expensive in the entire country).
As Vietnam was raging, Gore debated long and hard about how to handle the situation. Thinking that dodging the draft would hurt his political future, he enlisted and was able to get a stateside assignment as a reporter. With seven months left in his two-year tour, Gore was sent to Vietnam, where he was a reporter in the rear echelon, who, unlike the front-line troops, “got to live in safe air-conditioned barracks, take hot showers, eat hot food, and take in Saigon night life...” Despite Gore’s 1988 claim that he did guard duty in the bush, “The closest Gore and [his journalist buddy Mike] O’Hara came to combat was to arrive at firebases hours or even days after a firefight.”
From 1971 to 1976, Gore plodded along, turning in mediocre perform-ances as a reporter, a divinity student, and a law student (he didn’t finish either course of study). He also smoked pot heavily, most witnesses claim, until 1972, although one former friend of his says Gore toked hash and opium-laced pot until he declared his candidacy for the House of Reps in 1976.
Once in the House, Gore purposely made a name for himself by taking on such popular but easy targets as poisonous baby food, toxic waste, and carcinogenic children’s pajamas. He was well known among his colleagues for hogging the spotlight and appearing on TV at every opportunity. “His fellow class of ‘76
Member and rival Richard Gephardt nicknamed Gore ‘Prince Albert’ for his constant preening before the cameras.”
He sat on the fence regarding the events in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It’s at this point that the authors’ conservative views become apparent. They criticize Gore for not supporting the Contras, which is bad or good depending on your political views. The fact that he tried to play both sides, though, should be troubling (but not surprising) to everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. The authors also take Gore to task for not supporting Reagan’s nuclear build-up and SDI, and later they lambaste him for supporting regulation and an end to the ban on gays and lesbians in the military.
Gore’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 was bankrolled by “Maryland millionaire real estate developer” Nathan Landow, who had personal and business associations with organized crime figures. Thanks to Gore’s dullness and micromanage-ment, he lost to Michael Dukakis, who then got his ass kicked by George Bush. It’s around this time that Gore began to forge his deep, mutually profitable ties to China.
During the campaign, Gore bragged to his Southern audiences that he had personally raised and sold tobacco. He told them that he supported tobacco subsidies. He also accepted money from tobacco PACs from 1979 to 1990. All of this despite the fact that his chain-smoking sister died an agonizing death from lung cancer in 1984. After the Clinton Administration declared war on the tobacco industry in the mid-1990s, Gore suddenly started using his dead sister as a teary-eyed political prop. He’s also done the same thing with his son, Albert III, who nearly died after being hit by a car in 1989.
In 2000 Gore declared that he never voted for anti-abortion legislation while he was in Congress, but this is a flat-out lie. In actuality, during his time in the House and Senate he voted against abortion “on 84% of all recorded roll call votes on the issue.... He spoke against abortion in recorded Congressional speeches and wrote against abortion in letters to many constituents.” He moved away from his pro-life stance after losing the nomination in 1988, and two weeks after being tapped for VP by Clinton in 1992, Gore miracu-lously became a full-fledged pro-choice feminist. (Kind of the mirror image of the way George Bush suddenly moved from supporting choice to opposing abortion around the same nanosecond that Reagan made him his running mate.)
Speaking of flip-flops, Gore broke with the Democratic leaders of the Senate to support the Persian Gulf War. In a January 1991 speech, trying to minimize his alienating stance, he declared that the goal of the war should be to expel Iraq from Kuwait, not to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. However, three
months later, Gore started pillorying President Bush for not pressing into Iraq, protecting the Kurds, and overthrowing Hussein. He com-pared Bush to Stalin for doing exactly what Gore had pushed for that January.
Naturally, Gore is famous for giving lip service to the environment. His actions tell a different story, though. He has been an active pro-ponent of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has built numerous dams and nuclear reactors. “His Tennessee farm was strip-mined for zinc by three different companies, one of them A r m a n d Hammer’s mining subsidiary.” He even flails his arms about over-population though he and Tipper churned out four kids. But in 1989, Gore suddenly became an eco-warrior, penning Earth in the Balance, which completely buys into the myths and failed predic-tions of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and even compares society’s treatment of the earth to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust. Even into 2000, Gore said he completely stands by what he wrote, including the part about abolishing the internal combustion engine. He never has bothered to renounce his old ways, though. Unfortunately, the authors drop the ball here, failing to show that Gore has continued to help trash the environment since 1 9 8 9 . The other Gore exposé, discussed below, does cover this ground.
In 1992 Bill Clinton picked Al Gore as his running mate because Gore at least appeared to be an ethical family man who had experi-ence in Congress and was cherished by important leftist sectors, such as environmentalists who were bamboozled by Earth in the Balance. Gore became the most powerful VP in American history. One thing he did with his power was to throw all kinds of support at Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, a corrupt, mobbed-up incompetent who hurt not only Russia but also the US by allowing the Russian Mafia to do whatever it wanted, including stealing money from the IMF and extorting players in the NHL. “Incredibly enough, Gore continues to socialize with Chernomyrdin and to con-sult him for advice on Russian affairs.”
Prince A l b e r t gives a barebones outline of the fundraising scandals (particularly the Buddhist temple shakedown), in which Gore helped Chinese communist agents and high officials give millions of dollars to the Democratic National Committee in exchange for access to the President and the White House, America’s military technology secrets, and the President’s acquiescence in China’s bullying of Taiwan. In China in 1997, Gore raised his glass to toast Prime Minister Li Peng, the man who ordered the Tiananmen massacre, even though Gore had raked George Bush over the coals when two US officials had toasted Peng years earlier.
Likewise, the book quickly sketches some of Gore’s other conflicts of interest and potential scandals, such as uranium deals with Russia, the Teamsters election scam, and helping 5,000 felonious immigrants gain American citizenship so they would vote Democrat. There’s also some good info on the dirty dealings of Gore’s afore-mentioned close friend Nathan Landow, who tried to shake down the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe (whom he called “a bunch of goddamned uneducated Indians”) and pressured Kathleen Willey not to testify that Clinton had sexually touched her in the Oval Office. Of course, the authors also look at Gore’s defense of Clinton during the whole Lewinsky/impeachment quagmire.
The book ends with a look at the odd cast of characters that Gore brought onboard to run his 2000 campaign: a man who might be criminally indicted for shady dealings, a tobacco industry lobbyist, a race-baiter, people who specialize in slanderous attack ads, and his stealth advisor, Naomi Wolf, who wants to transform Gore into an “alpha male.”
In the end, Prince Albert is a serviceable look at Gore’s waffling, lies, and scandals. It suffers from leaden prose, and it should have con-centrated on Gore’s more recent escapades rather than spreading itself evenly but thinly over his whole life. Prince Albert occasionally misses the boat with regard to Gore’s unsavory activities. This might be because the authors are conservatives. I have to wonder if, for example, Gore’s ties to Big Oil are only given the barest attention because Bush and Cheney are also in Oil’s pocket.
No such problems with Al Gore: A U s e r’s Manual, though. Wr i t t e n by leftist muckrakers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair— who produce the excellent newsletter CounterPunch—this bookcalls Gore on all his bullshit. By doing so, it demonstrates that true, informed leftists also loathe Gore. Some of the brightest lights on the left have lit into Gore and/or Clinton: Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, James Ridgeway, Sam Smith, Cockburn and St. Clair, The Nation, Verso publishing, even Camille Paglia (who oxymoronically calls herself a “libertarian Democrat”). I find this fascinating since it shows such a clear dif-ference between the left and the right. Can you imagine a gallery of prominent conservative commentators and reporters attacking George W. Bush? Can you imagine a conservative publisher put-ting out an exposé of Bush written by two conservatives? It could never happen. Just why the left is willing to do this while the right would never do such a thing, except perhaps under torture, is a topic for another time. Right now, let’s look at what the CounterPunchers reveal about Gore.
*MORE TO COME*
