Al Gore, presidential candidate of the Dimple party, proposed a meeting with George W. Bush last week “not to negotiate, but to improve the tone of our dialogue in America.” Bush cordially turned Gore down. But there’s plenty Gore can do on his own to “improve the tone.” He can start by putting a muzzle on his own advisers. The worst, in a close race, has been Paul Begala.
You may recall Begala as the altar boy of the Clinton administration, a man who distinguished himself during the Lewinsky scandal as the Clinton spinner who noted credulously that his boss had “looked the American people in the eye, and said he did not have an improper physical relationship, that he didn’t ask anyone to lie.” Quoth Begala: “That’s enough. I believe in this man.”
You might think that after the shock to his system Begala must have suffered upon learning the truth of the Lewinsky allegations, the man would seek a new line of work, one where he wouldn’t be duped so badly. But no, being used by and lied to by Bill Clinton seems to have had the perverse effect of aggravating Begala’s political Manicheanism: His side is still Virtue on stilts, and Republicans are Evil incarnate. Begala learned this shtick from James Carville, who performs it with greater panache and at least seems aware it is shtick. Not so Begala. His November 13 essay for the MSNBC website, titled “Banana Republicans,” is an astonishing outburst.
Begala is reacting against the national map that showed Bush counties in red and Gore precincts in blue. “If you look closely at that map,” he writes, “you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart — it’s red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay — it’s red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees — it’s red. The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African-Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they’re all red too.”
This is not “a more complex picture.” This is political hate speech. So much for the tone of our dialogue.
