LETTERS: GORE MARGINALLY BETTER THAN BUSH BUT NADER'S BEST

To the editor:

Out front, I would like your readership to know that I intend to vote for Ralph Nader of the Green Party in the imminent presidential election. Having said that, I would like to comment, positively and negatively, on a couple of things that have been said about Vice President Al Gore.

Contrary to what habitual Democratic Party voters would have us believe, Gore is only marginally a better candidate than Texas Gov. George W. Bush. What really turned me off about him is an issue that doesn't exist anymore: How should we treat the matter of Elian Gonzalez? Gore, in an ignominious attempt to suck up to a bunch of fanatics who would not vote for him if he were to give Fidel a 9 mm brain hemorrhage on live television, came out for letting Florida courts decide the matter. It's a small matter, to be sure, but it illustrates what a wee man Gore is. I really pity the U.S. electorate for its lousy range of choices this year -- Ralph Nader excepted, of course.

I have heard it said that Gore's threat to coerce the creative forces in Hollywood and New York into toning down sexual and violent content in their entertainment product directed at the young, coupled with his acceptance of support and finance from these same forces, constitutes hypocrisy. Au contraire. In my opinion, since the support and finance were given him well in advance of his threatening rumbles, this could be construed as an indication that he might not be as much of a political prostitute as the Elian Gonzalez matter might indicate.

The notorious talking heads keep referring to Gore's supposed assertion that he had discovered Love Canal. Students on the scene at the school when and where Gore supposedly made this claim went to great pains, writing a lengthy article, to make it known that whatever of Gore's words were interpreted to make it seem that he had claimed to be the discoverer of Love Canal had been misinterpreted and taken out of context.

I saw the article in two publications, one of them the op-ed page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Those students were at no time under the impression that Gore was claiming to be the discoverer of Love Canal. My suspicion is that he intended the word "discovered" in the same way that one would use it in saying, "I discovered the most delightful restaurant the other day." Manifestly, the speaker did not discover, in the sense that Pasteur discovered bacteria, the restaurant. Its original owner, or perhaps his first customer, did.

Why rightists, who fancy themselves the moral compass of this nation, are not taken to task when they promulgate these whoppers is beyond me.

Nader rules! Up the Greens!

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.