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The Latest News
on Power and Evil
in Washington
(and Elsewhere)
PUBLISHED
ON SEPTEMBER 6
PANAM 103 TRIAL:
The Case Falls Apart;
Inside Story of How the
US and the UK Tried
for Years to Insure the
PanAm 103 Case Would
Never Come to Trial in
a Fair Courtroom Because
They Knew They Couldn't
Make the Case Stick
How Qaddafi, Helped
by Mandela and a Canny
Scots Lawyer, Called
the West's Bluff
How the Western
Press Covered Up
NADER'S CAMPAIGN:
Is It Building a Movement?
PUBLISHED
ON AUGUST 28
COUNTERPUNCH
GOES TO LA
A FIELD DAY
FOR THE HEAT:
Cops Riot As Planned,
Bravely Trample Trapped
Crowd With Horses,
Fire Point Blank
At Unarmed Kids,
Amid Huzzas of Press
GORE/LIEBERMAN TICKET:
Sprayed With Cash
In Tinseltown;
Judeo-Christian
God Hailed At
Every Turn
EDWARD SAID
ON RALPH NADER:
What Nader's Campaign
Means for America
and the World
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
The Getty Museum vs.
The Watts Towers
BASIC INSTINCT:
Tipper's Secret
Love Diaries
PUBLISHED
ON AUGUST 1
THE TRUTH ABOUT
DICK CHENEY:
He's Dumb
SPECIAL PRE-LA
REPORT ON AL GORE:
° Soul Brother to Newt
° Betrayer the Environment
° Friend of Nuclear Power
° Hated by Senate Colleagues
° New Deal Sabotuer
° Reinventing Government
on the Backs of the Poor
Search CounterPunch
Whiteout:
the CIA, drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|
September 7, 2000
Lieberman's Sermonizing
The God Squad
Remember
the days when liberal groups screamed with fear on a daily basis
about the onrush of the Christian right and raised millions by
playing on the fear that Pat Robertson would seize power and
force God's way down the throats of all freedom-loving Americans?
Earlier this week in Peoria, Illinois,
Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman was at
it again. He said religion should be part of public life and
politicians have an obligation to make America's "moral
future better by the tone we set." Just over a week earlier,
on August 27 at the Fellowship Chapel Church in Detroit, Lieberman
declared, "the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion,
not freedom from religion."
Lieberman nominated the Judeo-Christian
God as the basis of morality and the spiritual engine of our
society. "As a people," he said, we need to reaffirm
our faith and renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves
to God and God's purpose."
So much for the separation of church
and state. On its face, Lieberman's interpretation of the First
Amendment's prohibition of state support for religion is ludicrous.
The First Amendment is scarcely obscure: "Congress shall
make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof." Lieberman apears to be entirely
ignorant the history of American common law and of deocratic
principles expressed in the Constitution and expanded thereafter.
Such principles
allowed Americans to think as they pleased so long as they didn't
harm other people or break the law. Whether they believed in
God, Gaia or the sacred anima of the brussel sprout was their
business. What Lieberman is proposing is a retrogressive throwback
to the notion of religious-based 'ethical unity' that was prevalent
prior to the American Revolution.
The significance of the abandonment
of 'ethical unity' is well explained by William E. Nelson in
his study of the evolution of American jurisprudence The Americanization
of the Common Law: "Taken together, the various libertarian
changes in law [in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries]
did far more than merely restructure institutions, safeguard
the procedural rights of criminal defendants, and grant equal
rights to certain previously underprivileged classes. Those changes
contributed in important ways to the breakdown of the ideal inherited
from the pre-revolutionary period that communities should stand
united in the pursuit of shared ethical ends. The breakdown of
ethical unity began in the 1780s with the virtual cessation of
criminal prosecutions for various sorts of immorality. What was
beginning to occur after the Revolution was not significantly
more immorality but an abandonment of the pre-revolutionary notion
that there was any one set of ethical standards that all men
ought to obey.'"
The
liberal response to Lieberman's astounding assertions has been
wretchedly feeble. If such words had come out of the mouth of
Pat Buchanan or Pat Robertson, groups such as People for the
American Way would have rushed to sound the alarm. But since
Lieberman is a Democrat and furthermore a Democrat running as
Al Gore's man, a decorous silence has mostly prevailed.
It's an odd day when one has to
cite the Anti Defamation League for doing the (obviously) right
thing, since it almost never does. But on August 28 the ADL published
an open letter denouncing Lieberman's use of the elections to
promote religion. The signatories, ADL National Chairman Howard
Berkowitz and National Director Abraham Foxman, wrote, "The
First Amendment requires that government neither support one
religion over another nor the religious over the nonreligiousThe
United States is made up of many different types of people from
different backgrounds and different faiths, including individuals
who do not believe in any god, and none of our citizens, including
atheistic Americans, should be made to feel outside of the electoral
or political process." B'nai B'rith, the parent group of
the ADL, hastily dissociated itself from Berkowitz and Foxman.
Gore,
himself Born Again some years ago along with Tipper, found no
reason to chide Lieberman. Indeed the Democratic presidential
candidate has a unappetizing streak of sermonizing religiosity
in his own character. Gore strenuously supported Tipper's repellent
campaign in the mid-Eighties to censor music and to persuade
the recording industry to blacklist certain groups. Once again
liberal groups have remained mute on Gore's record.
In Detroit this week Lieberman
said to workers "If you see men and women as created in
the image of God, then you will not treat them as extensions
of machines, as pure things to take advantage of, and that is
what the labor movement is about, justice to people, fairness
to people."
Note the senator's vagueness. Why
not a few words about labor and the WTO? Labor and the flight
of jobs overseas? Politicians to talk about God and morality
as a way to avoid confronting truly unmentionable topics in this
election, like trade or who's getting richer and who isn't. To
get details on these topics you have to listen to Ralph Nader,
not only the first Arab American to run for the presidency but
the first in many years to spare us sermons about morality and
God.
Bush Campaign Finally Gets Serious
In
a move likely to boost his sagging status in the polls George
W. Bush gave a major policy address earlier this week on the
communications industry. Just before a campaign speech in Illinois,
Mr Bush whispered to his running mate Dick Cheney: "There's
Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times."
Mr Cheney responded, "Oh yeah, he is, big time." Bush
and Cheney supposedly were ignorant that the microphone in front
of them was "open", though some suspect that Bush knew
perfectly well what he was doing.
Hopefully this is only the keynote
for more extended criticisms of the Fourth Estate by the Texas
governor. Clymer is a political correspondent for the New York
Times, whose commentaries down the years have been unrelentingly
drab and mediocre. The last Republican candidate to lay into
the press at the national level was Spiro Agnew, Nixon's running
mate. However, his labored formulations ("Nattering nabobs
of negativism") lacked Bush's pithy precision. CP
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