If Joe Lieberman gets to be a VP candidate, I will not vote for Gore. I am a Democrat. I have nothing against Lieberman being Jewish. However, the selection will realize my fears: the Democratic party is becoming a party of censorship. It is the absolute wrong response to George Bush’s efforts to be more inclusive.
Joseph Lieberman is a member of the Parents Tevevision Council (PTC). Some of their goals are laudable. However, L. Trent Bozell, the leader, seems to have a fixation to eliminate my favorite form of entertainment, professional wrestling. They claim to want to ‘tone some of the aspects’ down. Okay. However, when WWF did, the PTC was proven never to be satisfied. They did not want The Rock to address the delegates in the Republican National Convention, despite that:
–There are, counting WWF and WCW ratings and independents throughout the country, approximately 19,000,000 wrestling fans in the country who can vote.
–Abraham Lincoln, the politician cited most, especially by republicans, was one of the best wrestlers of his day.
Wrestling fans are not as dumb as the PTC hoped we are. We are among the most internet-savvy group. Some wrestling fans in a web site exposed the fact the the PTC was getting a lot of money off sales of WWF products sold by third parties. The PTC wound up censoing parts of their own web site as a result. The Rock even proved that wrestlers are not so dumb. He out-did L. Trent Bozell in the mini-debate at C-SPAN before Wednesday’s session. Probably that’s the real reason why the PTC idn’t want The Rock there.
The Lieberman selection would be coupled with Tipper Gore, Al’s wife. She led efforts to censor ganster and sexist rap music, through her PMRC. She had record labels put that parental advsory notice you see on some CD’s today. It was the worst thing she had ever done to rap, and music in general. She and Delores Tucker made those styles of rap music much more popular than it deserved to be, because of its ‘forbidden fruit’ status. The ascendacy of sexist and ganster rap with Tipper Gore’s help pushed other rap styles into the background. So here was a case of an attempt at censorship horribly backfiring.
So now we have a censor as a wife of the presidential candidate, and a potential VP candidate who is a member of an advisory board that wanted to have a half-Black, half-Polynesian man censored from the Republican National Convention. Anybody who read the last sentence would think “That’s the Republican Party for you.” However, it would be the Democrats faced with this ignobility.