Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Look For; The Union Libel

Friday September 22, 2000

There are three inviolate rules of politics:
    - Don't argue with a guy who buys his ink by the barrel (a point we
made earlier this week);
    - Solidify your base first; and,
    - If you are going to make something up, don't do it when Walter
Shapiro is watching.

At a Teamster's meeting the other day, Al "Lips-'O-Gold" Gore said he remembered the "Look for the Union Label" jingle being sung to him as a lullaby when he was a baby, notwithstanding Gore's only real contact with union members while growing up would have been ordering room service at the Fairfax Hotel in Your Nation's Capital.

Walter Shapiro, columnist for USA Today and one of America's - er, the USA's - smartest writers, wrote an entire column pointing out the fact that the song was first made public in 1975 when Gore was 27 years old. To see Walter's column, go here.

In less than a week Gore has made up stories about his mother-in-law and prescription drugs and being rocked to sleep by Ma Joad.

The song was the centerpiece of an advertising campaign for the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) which is now the Union of Needletrades, Industrial & Textile Employees (UNITE).

It was one of the most successful jingles in advertising history. To see the lyrics (as I remember them from being sung to me by the upstairs nurse in our palatial four bedroom (after the attic was converted into two of them), two bath, Cape Cod-style house WITH a detached garage on Long Island) go here.

The specter of enormously high heating oil prices in the Gore stronghold of the Northeast has the entire Clinton-Gore administration spinning like a drill bit through a sandstone overburden.

Al Gore said yesterday the President should release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to lower the price of oil.

A couple of weeks ago Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote:
   "[Federal Reserve] Chairman Greenspan and I believe that using
    the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at this time, as proposed by [the
    Department of Energy], would be a major and serious policy
    mistake."

According to Martin Crutsinger's AP piece yesterday, "The Summers memo said the Energy proposal would 'set a dangerous precedent' by using the reserve to 'manipulate prices' rather than sticking to the stockpile's original purpose of responding to supply disruptions.

The precedent is, apparently, not so dangerous now as it was on September 13 when he wrote the memo, so yesterday Summers changed his tune to say in an interview with Crutsinger, "We have always recognized that this would be, and indeed has been, a rapidly evolving situation and we all need to monitor it closely."

The evolving situation is this: The Gore campaign is beginning to sag and - turn down the sound on your TV set if you don't want to hear this - this administration will say and do anything to win an election.

"Shameless Joe" Lieberman, shilling for Gore in front of the Hollywood crowd was quoted as saying, "We will nudge you, but we will never become censors."

Not having been invited, Mullings can only guess that although the quote reads "We will nudge you�" what he REALLY said is: We will noodge you. The "oo" sound in noodge is pronounced like book or took.

To be a noodge, in Yiddish, is to be a pest, or a Major League Pain in the � oh, let's don't go there again. This usage translates to "We will pester you, but �"

The addition of Lieberman into the campaign has brought home the problem of transliterating Yiddish words into English type. Noodge, becomes nudge. And, there is no English typographic representation of the first phoneme in the word chutzpah, which is pronounced like the last phoneme in the name Bach. Ah, Bach!

More on the showbiz-Gore connection. British entertainer Elton John sang at a soft money fundraiser the other night and decided he needed to stick his nose into our election saying awful things about George W. Hey! Knacker! Shut up. Go home. Buy some better hair.

By the way, knacker is Yiddish for "big shot" and is pronounced "k'n-AH-ker." See what I mean?

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Copyright © 2000 Richard A. Galen

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