Posted on 12/01/2002 6:46:34 AM PST by jern
By William F. Buckley Jr.
The Democratic leadership is having a very rough time, and Al Gore (news - web sites) is their roughest time. Since, as a conservative, this columnist is presumably a link in the vast right-wing conspiracy -- bolder and more comprehensive than anything Senator McCarthy had in mind when he talked about left-wing conspiracies -- let me divulge how we operate.
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The Republican Party gets an idea -- let's say to drill for oil in Alaska. A GOP operative is designated to pass that idea along to the thought-factories the GOP controls.
Somebody calls Rush Limbaugh. Then The Washington Times. Then Fox News. Then George Will. The marching order goes something like this:
"Fellow gangsters: There is oil in parts of Alaska. If we drill for that oil, we can get contributions to the GOP from the people who get the drilling contracts. Subsequently, from the people who build pipelines to transport the oil. And ever after, from the sale of that oil to -- well, gas stations, that sort of thing. GET THE WORD OUT. Dress it up. You know, oil is scarce, the American people need oil. Etc. etc. etc.
"You -- Rush -- dress that up in populist language, talk about the great American spirit of adventure and development. You -- George -- put that in fancy historical language, the stuff about manifest destiny, etc. You -- gentlemen at Fox -- talk about the news effect of Alaskan oil exploration, how it will diminish the egos in the Mideast. That sort of thing. I hardly need tell you how to do it. Just do it."
But the networking has been exposed now. In the days of Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton (news - web sites) wasn't able to pin it down with archaeological precision. For that reason, Al Gore lost the election. But now that he has recovered from that loss, shaved his beard and written a new book, he is back on the scene with a sure-enough afflatus: the Republican National Committee (news - web sites), on through the networkers, resulting in -- a new zeitgeist!
Mr. Gore, in a recent news conference, got quite specific on the matter. He was so enthusiastic about his revelation that he lost complete control of his language. But that didn't matter. It wasn't as if he was captaining a 747 landing, which calls for razor-sharp precision. In his interview with The New York Observer, Al Gore said that Fox, The Washington Times and Rush Limbaugh -- "there's a bunch of them" -- are, some of them, "financed by wealthy ultraconservative billionaires." Non-wealthy billionaires are presumably too busy trying to become wealthy billionaires to give much time to politics.
Sen. Tom Daschle, picking his fight with Rush Limbaugh, spoke of the "shrill rhetoric of conservative talk radio." Shrill rhetoric is the kind of language used by those who are exploited by wealthy ultraconservative billionaires. And then Al Gore is telling us that the effect of the vast right-wing conspiracy is -- well, let him tell it: "They'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they'll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist."
Pushed into the zeitgeist! How do you do that? Affect the spirit of the age? Does Coca-Cola know how to do that? Burger King? Muhammad?
Back to oil in Alaska. Are we hearing that the other side hadn't had its say in the matter? Yet drilling for oil in Alaska was first proposed about 25 years ago, and permission to proceed has not yet been granted. Is that because the zeitgeist was being stalled by the Clinton-Gore administration before the wealthy billionaires finally took over and handed policy-making to Rush Limbaugh?
Persisting with the language of Al Gore, he explains: "Pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist."
We're being told that the people who take polls and say that half the country is in favor of drilling for oil in Alaska rigged those so-called objective polls. They present the polls "disingenuously," pass them off as popular writ, like a lot of election polls. In other words, they know they're cheating. But what does that matter to them? Just so they do what the wealthy billionaires want.
Is this stuff going to work? The Democratic leadership just can't stand it that the conservative critique is making headway in America. They preferred it the way it used to be,
Who is Al Gore, again?
Oh, man! Buckley's STILL GOT IT!!!
Gesundheit!
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