Sound and Fury, Signifying a Distraction?

Unbelievable!
Test Ban follies and the latest wave of Gore-bashing

by Tamara Baker

Friday, November 5, 1999 --Saint Paul, Minn. (APJ)--I was originally planning to do a nice little piece comparing Al Gore and George W. Bush, relying heavily on their own words as related in Talk magazine.

But then I saw this in the October 29th edition of the New York Times:

Eager to insure that a treaty banning nuclear testing is never revived, some of the accord's most ardent foes in the Senate are discussing a plan to gut a $300 million global monitoring system that is half built and seen as essential to making the pact work.

Emboldened by the Senate's rejection of the treaty two weeks ago, a small but powerful band of senior aides to Republican senators is pushing to kill the American share of the costs for an agency created to put the treaty into force and set up the worldwide surveillance system. Without Washington's aid, experts say, the monitoring network is likely to collapse.

Now, what was the GOP's excuse for killing the Comprehensive Test-BanTreaty?

Answer: They said it was "unverifiable".

So what do they do next? They attempt to scuttle the global monitoring system -- a system that is already half built, mind you -- in order to ensure that the treaty stays dead, because the monitoring system is essential in order to verify that the terms of the treaty are being met.

I swear to God, these people would happily blow up the world just so they could say they denied Bill Clinton a "victory."

But, I hear you say, this is just a few crazy old Jesse-Helms-style trogdolytes doing this. Surely the GOP Senate leadership is uniformly against this disastrous foolishness?

Guess again.

The article goes on to note that some senior Republican senators, such as Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, are indeed aware of the strategy, though it still needs final approval from such GOP bigwigs as Lott and Mitch McConnell, who oversees foreign aid bills.

The fact that Lott has not condemned this horrific plan out of hand should send chills down the spine of any sane American - hell, any sane person on this globe, period. Here, instead, is what he did say, according to the article: "We're going to take a look at that and see if there's a need for that money."

In addition, other Republicans, including Paul Coverdell of Georgia and James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, have expressed interest in the proposal, according to the NYT article.

The senior GOP Senate aides are hoping to push it through as part of a session-ending budget deal between the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress. They are that the monitoring aid's price tag -- $16 million this year -- gets lost in the reshuffling of billion-dollar programs.

Let's just hope that the New York Times article alerted enough people to the dangerously stupid and petty schemes of these GOP aides.

Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated but quite frustrating matter, after seeing the latest outrageous Gore-bashing article from the pen of Jake Tapper, Jesse Ventura's fan and biographer, in Salon, I had to reply. Here's what I wrote:

The great psychiatrist Erich Fromm described two kinds of power: "power to" and "power over".

"Power to" - the power to create, to love, to build, to give - is what we feel when we feel healthy, competent, self-assured.

"Power over" - power over others - is the pale substitute sought out when a person feels lacking in "power to". It causes its victims to feel that they can only be built up by knocking others down, rightly or wrongly.

Jake Tapper, known Reform Party partisan, wants to advance the political hopes of Jesse Ventura in particular and the Reform Party in general.

Now, one would think that the Reform Party should be strong enough to stand on its own merits, whatever they are (Platform? We don't need no steeenking platform!), to not to need to stoop to bizarre and disingenuous trashing of their political opponents. And in fact, to his great credit, Jesse Ventura does not do so himself.

The same, however, cannot be said of his follower Jake Tapper.

Tapper in his single-minded desire to trash Al Gore and pretend that the Veep's campaign is "floundering" when in fact Gore is rapidly closing the gap on Dubya, as several recent polls have shown, is not only prevaricating about Al Gore, he is also smearing poor Naomi Wolf, who, far from being the evil "controversial" being Tapper and Rush Limbaugh try to make her out to be, is in fact as doctrinally sound feministically as Gloria Steinem herself.

But, you see, the Reform Party's dirty little secret is that it isn't too keen on women. Not liberated ones, at any rate. They tend to be soft and oogy and favor things like integration and higher taxes for better schools: a
position generally anathema to the gummint-hating white males in the Reform Party's rank and file. Jesse Ventura was man enough, if you'll pardon the expression, to recognize this when he picked Mae Schunk to be his lieutenant governor; he admitted, as he said, that he needed some estrogen to go with his testosterone.

I knew that the backlash against feminism was far-reaching. It's sad to see it in the pages of Salon magazine.

Sincerely,

Tamara Baker