I have a perfect record so far as Bill Clinton is concerned -- I have never voted for the man. But that didn't stop me from vigorously denouncing the flood of lies that the Republicans used to nearly drive him from office. Nor did it stop me from criticizing the corporate media's shameful and despicable role in propagating these lies. I didn't let these travesties consume all my attention, but neither did I ignore them, nor -- like KPFK's Marc Cooper -- did I join forces with those attacking Clinton.

The reasons for this are remarkably simple:

(1) If they can do this to the President, then no one else stands a chance. Clinton never spent a day in jail because of lies and misrepresntations that New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth put on the national agenda, but Wen Ho Lee sure did.

(2) If they can do this to the President, they can extract virtually anything they want from him. Neither Clinton nor Gore represent any kind of true alternative to the Republicans, but there's a whale of diffrence between Clinton when he's getting sucker-punched by the Republican/corporate media propaganda machine and Clinton when he's surrounded by 50,000 anti-WTO demonstrators in Seattle.

(3) These lies present us with a tremendous opportunity to educate people about just how phony and unreliable the corporate media has become. If they'll repeatedly lie about the President, they'll lie about anything. After D2K, some in the corporate media refered to the IMC as the "fake media." This persistent pattern of lying about a center-right Democratic President & Vice President shows us just who the real "fake media" is.

(4) If we really have confidence in our ideas, in our vision, then we have a stake in *any* situation where lies threaten to obliterate the truth -- no matter who the target is. Naturally, some situations will be much more important to us than others, but when the target is the US President, the situation is the entire world.

All these points apply just as much to media lies about Gore. And I'll have a perfect record of not voting for him, either.