After he muzzles his advisers, if he is indeed serious about improving the tone of "our dialogue," Al Gore should dissociate himself from the not-so-subtle slurs by backers who are associating George W. Bush with the Nazis. Charles Paul Freund, writing for Reason Online, points to one egregious example.
"The biggest problem with [the Gore] storyline" in West Palm Beach, Freund notes, "is that it lacked a villain. Designed by and approved by local Florida Democrats, the controversial ballot could not be tied to any Bush allies. Lacking any antipathy to exploit, Gore attempted to mobilize guilt in its place; his campaign portrayed its blundering supporters as, once again, victims of history. Because many of the supposedly confused voters were blacks and elderly Jews, such figures as Jesse Jackson and film maker Michael Moore adopted one of the most grotesquely shameless political positions in recent political history: the exploitation of slavery and even the Holocaust in the interest of padding Al Gore's Florida vote.
"As Moore wrote on his website in arguing for a new vote in Palm Beach County, 'There are tens of thousands of people who lived through [the Holocaust], escaped the ovens, and are now living out their final years in South Florida. . . . Sixty-two years ago . . . the Holocaust began in full force on what was called Kristallnacht. The German government sent goon squads throughout the country to trash and burn the homes, stores, and temples of its Jewish citizens. Seven years and 6 million slaughtered lives later, the Jewish people of Europe were virtually extinct. A few survived. I will not allow those who survived to come here to this land of the free to be abused again.'"
And that's not all. In the midst of the Florida electoral war, this headline appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: "Author links Bush family to Nazis." According to John Loftus, author of Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks and a former prosecutor with the Justice Department's Nazi War Crimes Unit, George W. Bush's granddad Prescott was a principal in a bank that was secretly owned by Nazi industrialists during the 1930s and '40s. When the Union Banking Corporation dissolved in 1951, Prescott Bush made out with $ 1.5 million. "That's where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third Reich," Loftus said at the Sarasota Reading Festival.
The headline was unconscionable, as was the retelling of Loftus's tendentious argument. But at least the Herald-Tribune pointed out that both the Kennedys and the Rockefellers benefited from Nazi-related corporations and other such financial connections. By this same logic, of course, almost any family that had international financial dealings in the years before World War II can be said to have "links" to the Nazis. Why single out Bush? Because it's open season on Bushes. Now, what was that again about the tone of our dialogue?