Gore: Going both ways

It would be a genuine challenge to choose which special-interest
group in the Democratic Party has done the most to degrade virtue,
celebrate depravity, denigrate Christianity, and stunt the minds and
corrupt the hearts of our children. The leading contenders are:
educational unions, the abortion industry, the homosexual lobby, and the
entertainment industry.

Each has its own pernicious record. Educational unions have prevented
the reform of government schools, thus wasting the minds of millions of
children, particularly black and Hispanic children. The abortion
industry has successfully executed a campaign of violence and carnage
against 40 million unborn human babies. Homosexual activists have
successfully infiltrated and used the resources of large chunks of the
media to promote an agenda that runs directly counter to deep-rooted
religious values. And the entertainment industry has wantonly pounded
violence, sacrilege, profanity and depravity into the American psyche,
its targets ever younger.

How do these powerful groups survive and prevail? Let’s take the
entertainment industry as a case study to answer this question. On Sept.
13, the Senate Commerce Committee conducted a hearing to explore the
results of a Federal Trade Commission report which documents that music,
video game and Hollywood executives deliberately peddle sex and violence
to children. As examples, the entertainment industry targeted assorted
kiddie outlets such as comic books and television cartoons to attract
children to R-rated and “adult” movies. Violent, mature-rated video
games were marketed to children as young as 6 years old.

Al Gore was quickly out front with harsh condemnations of these
practices. He told those responsible that they had six months to stop
their marketing of sleaze and violence to children or else the
government would impose new federal legislation and regulations on such
practices.

Could this Gore, standing on a platform waving the FTC study and
denouncing Hollywood, be the same Gore who met with potential donors at
a fund-raiser in Hollywood last year, and reassured them that he had
nothing to do with this study? According to a story in the Los Angeles
Times, Aug. 10, 1999, “Gore made clear that the government study … was
the president’s idea, not his, and was initiated without his input.”

The Times story flagged the hypocrisy: “Al Gore was quick to join the
chorus of politicians who, after the Colorado school shootings, decried
Hollywood’s role in desensitizing young people to violence. But when he
huddled with industry executives last month at the Century Plaza Hotel
in Los Angeles, the vice president was gushing with film friendliness.”

That is the pattern: say and promise one thing in public, and say and
promise exactly the opposite behind closed doors to your allies. At the
recent Democratic Convention, the entertainment people were attacked
from the podium, but they showered an avalanche of money on
Gore-Lieberman at extravagant post-convention parties. Hollywood
magnates understand that the politicians they do business with have to
con the public.

Last year, before he became a vice-presidential candidate, Joseph
Lieberman had this to say about Hollywood: “If they continue to market
death and degradation to our children and pay no heed to the carnage,
then one way or another, the government will act.” At the FTC Senate
hearing on Sept. 13 of this year, Lieberman spoke out against a “culture
of carnage.” He sympathized with parents who are “locked in a losing
competition with the culture to raise our children.”

Could this be the same Joe Lieberman who, immediately after his FTC
testimony, attended a succession of opulent, star-studded fund-raisers
in New York and California, shamelessly pandering to and gushing over
the people he had just denounced? How could a man who accused Hollywood
of marketing “death and degradation” say to them, “Al and I have
tremendous regard for this industry … We are both fans of the products
that come out of the entertainment industry … I promise you this: We
will never, never put the government in the position of telling you by
law, through law, what to make. We will nudge you, but we will never
become censors”?

It is not difficult for the Hollywood money men to know who they are
dealing with and what they have bought with the $50 million they have
contributed to the Democrats since 1992. At most of the Hollywood-type
fund-raisers the Gores and Liebermans attend, they are treated to
special in-your-face entertainment laced with smut, profanity, and
anti-Christian bigotry.

The lack of protest to these vile indignities confirms to the sleaze
merchants that they have nothing to fear from these people.