Conservatives Gone Bad

I was surfing the web the other night and happened upon some strange liberal blog that had a link to this article by Paul Craig Roberts. Like you, I had never heard of him but the complete stupidity of his article forced me to email him (since he puts his email link on his pieces, which I applaud).

So I did a bit of research on Mr. Roberts. Turns out he used to write for the very conservative TownHall.com website. Now I’m not exactly sure what flipped him to the not so bright side but I’m trying to find out.

In Robert’s latest piece he says that “Al Gore gave what I believe to be the most important political speech in my lifetime, and the New York Times, "the newspaper of record," did not report it. Not even excerpts…So much for "the liberal press" that right-wingers rant about. If a "liberal press" exists, the New York Times is certainly no longer a member.”

I guess nowadays not being reported on is somehow akin to being censored since that’s the title of the link to the speech, “Gore Censored”. I guess I’ve been censored my whole life by that standard.

He goes on to say “Gore challenged the American people to step up to the task of defending the Constitution, a task abandoned by the media, the law schools, and the Democratic and Republican parties. If we fail, darkness will close around us.”

Without Al Gore we’re going to be seeing the end of America as we know it, and soon.

In my first email to Roberts, I explained to him how the Clinton-Gore administration started the Echelon program and how it was used to wire-tap domestically long before the Bush administration started doing. I also explained to him how the New York Times reported on that development, which is summed up by this quote from a piece in the Times, “Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists….”

I later ran across a previous article written by Roberts about Al Gore in 2000 title "The Slide Into Dictatorship”, where he said such glowing things about him as…

“Choose Al Gore and vindicate eight years of lawlessness: Whitewatergate, Filegate, Travelgate, Monicagate, Campaign Finance and Buddhist Templegate, "missing" Rose law firm and Al Gore e-mail documents, Justice Department stonewalling of law and investigations, the Waco massacre -- the list goes on ad nauseum. Topping it all off is the latest Gore scandal -- a secret deal between our vice president and a Russian prime minister. Did you know that Gore illegally exempted Russia from the economic sanctions that the U.S. imposes on all countries that sell arms to Iran? In addition, Gore violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act by keeping Congress in the dark about Russia' nuclear cooperation with Iran. Is this another instance of "no controlling legal authority"? Here we see the true colors of Clinton Gore: The law means nothing if a political purpose is served by ignoring it. No matter how powerful his office, no U.S. official has the power to grant exemptions to U.S. law, regardless of the end served."

I again emailed Roberts about this totally flip-flop and here is his response:

“So what? Gore is the only one today defending the US Constitution. The Constitution is far more important. I know many sinners who, despite their transgressions, stood up for the right thing when it counted.”

That’s the response you get from a Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is also a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury.