Bribing them with your money

Ross Perot is often accused of trying to "buy the presidency." Maybe so, but at least he is using his own money.

That is not the case with the two Democrats fighting each other for the privilege of carrying out the same policies. When it comes to election year bribery, the superior powers of incum-bency emerge in their full splendor. For while Democrat Clinton can do no more than promise to spend your money, Democrat Bush is already stealing it.

There is nothing wrong with government awarding arma-ment contracts; indeed, the security of the population and the use of force (arms) for that purpose is the one and only legitimate purpose of government. Roads, schools, arts, and science do not need to be managed by guns.

But when Bush "creates jobs" by selling fighter planes, to whom? And why now? Taiwan is certainly a democracy threatened by the world's most powerful totalitarian state; but Saudi Arabia is itself a totalitarian country, and one supporting an ongoing war against a democracy. And why now, after treating Taiwan as a leper and kowtowing to the Red Chinese butchers for four years? Tough question.

Such bribes paid out of your pocket are especially interest-ing in the field of energy. Like other such gimmicks, ethanol (made from corn) as a gasoline additive has little to do with the environment, and everything with the votes of the corn belt. Rep.

Durbin (D-Ill.) made the promotion of ethanol his main activity in the House (using your money to send incessant circulars indiscriminately to energy editors around the country, such as myself a truly promising prospect). If you have a memory good enough to remember insignificant blabberers, you may recall that he ran in the Democratic primaries for president, but soon bowed out, since he was not able to disguise his radical "liberalism" as deftly as Clinton.

Ethanol reduces the levels of carbon monoxide in the winter, a true godsend for motorists struggling on the icy roads and through the snow drifts of Los Angeles, one of the few cities that does need more severe pollution control. But it also makes the gasoline more volatile; it sends smog-forming hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, such as that of Los Angeles and Houston. This persuaded even the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, and other so-called environmentalists, and even the EPA, to reject the proposal, lining up with a strange bed fellow: the oil industry.

When Churchill suggested Soviet-Vatican diplomatic ties to Stalin, the latter answered "How many divisions has the Pope?"

Your environmental president asked "How many electoral votes have the environmentalists and the oil industry?" and on 10/1/[92] he announced that at least 30% of gasoline sold in northern cities with smog problems would have ethanol blended with it. Corn farmers, who stand to sell 3.5 times as much corn if ethanol restrictions are removed, had poured millions into the battle. The chairman of Archer-Daniel-Midland, which controls 70% of the ethanol market, has contributed $1 million to Bush and the Republican party since 1988. But what is a paltry million com-pared to the billions that Bush can filch from the taxpayers' pockets? At the same election binge Bush announced a $3.6 bil-lion package of export credit guarantees to finance the sale of grains and other commodities. In a previous such binge in South Dakota on 9/2/[92], he had promised farmers a mere $1 billion in export subsidies.

There is irony in all this. That both Democratic rivals will swear high and low never to give in to special interests is trivial; for the lie is the politician's profession. But ''environmentalists'' are beginning to have fewer divisions than the Pope. In the first hour of Larry King interviewing Clinton and Gore (and who could stand more than one hour?) the word "environment" never turned up; it was avoided even by Gore, though his book reveals him as a fanatical eco-Neanderthal of rare ignorance.