or, another reason why I never could never whole-heartedly support Al Gore, regardless of how many spectacular speeches he makes, or how many elections were stolen from him:
WorkingForChange-Alexander Cockburn: The Gores' cultural wars Grandstanding about the entertainment industry has been a specialty of Al and Tipper Gore since Al first entered Congress in 1977 (a year in which the couple were formally born-again.) Tipper was part of a Congressional wives' club agitating against violence and sex on TV shows, and then, in the mid-1980s, came Tipper Gore's famous campaign, abetted by her husband, against explicit rock 'n rap music.Until Gore brought Lieberman on the ticket, Gore apologists tended to blame this foray into censorship as a misadventure by Tipper, ultimately rectified when the Gores traveled to Hollywood and told executives of the recording industry that the whole drive to censor music had been a mistake and somehow not their fault.
But since Gore and Lieberman are now revving up a culture war far more sinister than anything proposed by Dan Quayle back in 1992, it's worth remembering what exactly Tipper and Al Gore got up to fifteen years ago in their campaign against explicit rock 'n rap.
...
From the start, Tipper's PMRC worked hand in glove with right-wing fundamentalist Christian groups. One of her partners on the PMRC was Susan Baker (wife of Reagan's Treasury Secretary James Baker, a cabinet officer in the Reagan-Bush years), who was also a board member of the Reverend James Dobson's Focus on the Family. This outfit, based in Texas, was notoriously anti-gay and anti-abortion.This was not the only group touted by Tipper's PMRC. Take the Missouri Rock Project, an outfit run by an associate of Phyllis Schafly, which distributed information packets prepared by the Victory Christian Church of St. Charles, Mo., claiming that the Holocaust was overblown, that Hitler didn't write “Mein Kampf,” and that Hollywood shamelessly advocates race-mixing. The church described the slain civil rights leader, whose memory is often invoked by Al Gore, as “Martin Lucifer King.”
Music snobs never forget their enemies, and anyone having common ground with Christian-Taliban wannabes like James Dobson is 'on the list'.
(link from somewhere that I'll remember later)
