Helprin on Gore's perfidious performance before the VFW:
The Internet's Inventor Speaks to the VFW
Gore's claim to have rebuilt the military is an outrageous lie.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Tuesday, August 29, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
Last week, Al Gore went before the Veterans of Foreign Wars and delivered a speech in which he claimed, in regard to his service in Vietnam, that "I didn't do the most or run the gravest danger." How modest of him to admit that of the millions of American soldiers in that war, he was not the one who did the most. Nor was he, by his own self-deprecating admission, the bravest of these millions. He did allow himself, however, a great deal of running room and the potential to be, perhaps, No. 2. By graciously leaving the matter of rank up to the imagination of his listeners while being not too precise in his recounting, he was most generous, even if primarily to himself.
Like the president, this vice president has a madly inflated self-regard, and, like the president, to square his view of his own powers and importance with the facts as they exist he must torture the record. In an election-year speech to the VFW about defense, something his administration has mocked, abused, and neglected, what was he to do but deploy every evasion, omission, and distortion that he could muster?
Bragging of the prowess of the American armed forces as if in the past eight years he had helped rather than hindered them, he said, "Our Navy has more than twice as many surface ships as China." He failed to mention, however, that the Navy he inherited had four times as many, or that China, as much a continental power as we are a maritime power, has 70 tactical submarines to our 57, even if ours are far more capable, and a battle for the Taiwan Strait will hinge upon air power and submarines. Thus, to serve his ambition, he made reassurance out of facts that, in context, should be alarming.
"I'm proud," he said, "that we won the largest military pay increase in 20 years." "Won," that is, against a Republican Congress that consistently adds to his administration's defense requests. "Increase," that is, after a long period of shameful starvation when military personnel were cut by one-third and those that remained were paid like busboys and forced to turn to food stamps.
Not content to dissemble quietly, the vice president announced that he would "not go along with a huge tax cut" that would "make it impossible to modernize our armed forces and keep them ready for battle." In this he brilliantly followed his mentor and master in deflecting an attack on what he himself has done by claiming in high dudgeon that his opponent is about to do it and must be stopped. A tax cut would of course have no effect on George W. Bush's military budget, which every conscious person in the United States, left and right, knows would be appreciably in excess of a Gore military budget. Nor does the vice president propose to direct the surplus into military spending, and even if he did propose it, his proposal would be completely irrelevant to whether or not he would do it.
His speech seemed to have been illuminated by the strange light of hallucination. As vice president in an administration that with ideological consistency has denigrated the American military and compromised its funding, efficiency, and morale, he had the audacity to claim that his "year-after-year commitment to a strong American defense" makes him "so concerned when others try to run down America's military for political advantage in an election year." This is analogous to the rapist who, from the dock, indignantly asks the prosecutor, "How dare you question this young lady's virginity!"
The two examples are extreme, but equating them is not, because the lie is so big that it stuns the senses.
Perhaps as a result of the vice president's happiness with the VFW's reaction to what Shakespeare called "a kind of excellent dumb discourse," he improvised, or at least he appeared to improvise, by departing from his prepared text. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, he stated that he was "proud we finally reversed the defense cuts begun in the previous administration." Which administration? The first Clinton administration?
If so, what record is he running on? Is he proud finally to have reversed his own policy? Though to suit his purposes he is perfectly capable of such raw inconsistency, his comment must be taken as referring to the Bush administration, which did, of course, reduce military expenditure at the end of the Cold War.
If the Bush administration had kept to the level of spending it inherited, it would have spent in its four years $1.336 trillion. It actually spent $1.245 trillion, a four-year reduction of $91 billion. That was the Bush cut, intended to stop there. But the Clinton administration used this as a starting point from which to cut unjustly and more. If it had kept to the level of spending it inherited, for the seven years through 1999 it would have spent $2.089 trillion. But it actually spent $1.776 trillion, a seven-year reduction of $313 billion from a previously adjusted baseline. That was the Clinton cut.
If the Clinton rate were applied to a four-year period, it would work out to be $179 billion, or twice as much as the Bush cut during the same number of years. So, having cut on top of their own reduction and at double the rate and for twice as long as his predecessors, the Democratic nominee is "proud," "finally" (after, presumably, a long struggle against the defense-bashing Republicans) to have "reversed the defense cuts begun in the previous administration."
Why did the VFW applaud such brazen falsity? The VFW is an organization of former soldiers, not current accountants. Its members did not have these figures and histories in their heads, and gave the benefit of the doubt to a man who came before them and asked for their trust. The worst part of the vice president's performance was not merely the substance of his remarks but that he would so mislead and disrespect those who were once his fellow soldiers. But why not lie audaciously to the nation's veterans when you lie so audaciously to the nation itself, and the nation itself seems to care not at all that you lie?
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. His column appears Tuesdays.
opinionjournal.com |
