Politics

Once again, it's the season of the Republican and Democratic national conventions, this time choreographed in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Both events have been underwritten by business patrons; both cities are notorious for police misconduct. Hospitality and brutality -- the contrasts could hardly be more extreme.

In the City of Brotherly Love, the welcome mat was embossed with great riches. The Republican convention is brought to you by movers and shakers of Wall Street.

The Grand Old Party's jamboree ended up with a pricetag in excess of $50 million, mostly supplied via corporate donations. The same sort of financing is in the pipeline for the Democratic convention (estimated cost: $35 million) in the middle of August. The symmetry of the largess is breathtaking.

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush — the son of former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush — found himself in trouble and faltering after his New Hampshire defeat to Senator John McCain. A shadowy, secretive and spooky network centered around right wing religious organizations and causes rushed to his rescue in South Carolina.

At the crux of this network is the Council for National Policy (CNP) founded in 1981 by the Rev. Tim LaHaye and T. Cullen Davis, members of the ultra-right John Birch Society with financial backing from Nelson Bunker Hunt. Currently, the clandestine CNP has over 500 members and serves as the Who’s Who network of the United States’ right wing. At the center of the CNP, with a seemingly endless supply of questionable cash, is self-proclaimed Messiah and mind control cult leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Just as in Europe, prominent people here are still busy striking moral attitudes about Joerg Haider, the Austrian head of the Freedom Party now being treated as the greatest menace to Austrian decorum since the Turks besieged Vienna in 1683. Try this one from Paul Fireman, chairman and CEO of Reebok International, handed down from Reebok headquarters in Stoughton, Mass., on Feb 11, 2000.

"In 1994, I learned from an associate in London that Joerg Haider appeared in an Austrian video wearing Reebok products. Upon learning of this, I ordered an immediate investigation, and found that an employee in Austria, acting on his own behalf, without any knowledge of Reebok International, had provided product for this video. This individual's actions were a clear violation of Reebok's code of conduct, and totally against what we stand for. I asked for his immediate dismissal from our Austrian subsidiary. Reebok responded quickly and responsibly to a deplorable situation. Reebok has never supported Haider. His opinions are abhorrent to me personally, and in direct conflict with the values of human rights that form the core values of this company."

Not the least dismaying aspect of the most recent crisis in Northern Ireland has been the stampeding of public opinion here in the United States into denunciation of the IRA, and into sympathy to the political maneuvers of the British government and of the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble. Naturally enough, this sudden tilt is being viewed with profound satisfaction by the British, not to mention the Ulster Unionists, who have chafed for years at the admirable refusal of the Clinton administration to take dictation from the British Embassy in Washington.

Tens of thousands of high-flown words have now been devoted to the IRA's supposed flouting of the 1998 Good Friday agreement, the IRA's lack of good faith, and Sinn Fein's duplicity.

We're in for an orgy of boasting, this campaign year, about the dropping crime rates, with the "get tough" crowd pounding their chests and claiming victory. For the first half of last year, FBI figures showed a 10 percent decline in "serious crime," meaning violent and property crime. Murder down by 13 percent, robbery off 10 percent, forcible rape down 8 percent. Starting with President Clinton, it would require near-inhuman forbearance for the man who has increased federal budgets for crime control from just over $1 billion to $4.5 billion over the past five years to eschew a boast over this "accomplishment."

But while crime rates -- on paper -- are continuing to drop across the country, these rates are dropping regardless of whether a tough or a lenient approach to crime is being applied. Take a look at San Francisco and New York. Since 1995, violent crime has dropped 33 percent in San Francisco and 26 percent in New York. Great law enforcement? Terrific timing? Perfect policy application? Hardly.

It's one of the marvels of the season that Bill Bradley has been able to muster to his cause such bankable liberal names as Senator Paul Wellstone, Prof. Cornel West, Robert Reich and the editor of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel. This passion for Bradley is strange. After all, Bradley is a man who flirted with the idea of running for the presidency in l996 on an independent ticket, with Colin Powell.

Lately, Al Gore has been tagging Bill Bradley as a free-spending liberal of the kind that the vice president and Bill Clinton have worked so tirelessly to extirpate from the party. There isn't much substance to the charge. Indeed, on the big issues, trade, labor, defense, crime, health care and the environment, Bradley and Gore are pretty much indistinguishable. Both sedulously follow the neo-liberal line charted by the Democratic Leadership Council back in the late 1980s.

Amid the latest batch of Nixon tapes, there's a ripe one from May 13, 1971, recently described by James Warren in the Chicago Tribune. Discussing welfare reform with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the president snarls about the "little Negro bastards," before remarking indulgently that "I have the greatest affection for them, but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years." The leader of the Free World and his senior advisers then drift into a chat about homosexuality, occasioned by the president's viewing of an "All in the Family" episode featuring Archie's son-in-law, described by the prez as "obviously queer, wears an ascot, but not offensively so."

Nixon: "I don't mind the homosexuality, I understand it. ... Nevertheless, god---mn, I don't think you glorify it on public television, homosexuality, even more than you glorify whores. We all know we have weaknesses. But god--mn it, what do you think that does to kids? You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them! Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates."

Ehrlichman: "But he never had the influence television had."