Imagine this: As George W. Bush and John McCain battle it out for the Republican nomination, an anti-abortion zealot sets fire to an abortion clinic.
Give us your best guess: What would be the first question on the lips of every reporter interviewing both Republican candidates?
Now shift the subject matter oh so slightly. This past Friday the radical environmental group, Earth Liberation Front, took credit for breaking into a University of Minnesota lab and uprooting about 800 oat plants that were part of a genetic engineering experiment aimed at improving plant resistance to disease. And the Minnesota attack was relatively mild compared with the New Year's Eve fire at Michigan State University's Agriculture Hall, which devastated a campus landmark and did $400,000 damage--also in the name of combating genetic engineering. ELF likewise claimed responsibility for a Christmas Day fire that destroyed the Oregon headquarters of Boise Cascade, a paper manufacturer accused of having "ravaged the forests of the Pacific Northwest."
Yet we haven't seen one question asking the Democratic Party's leading environmentalist to disavow ELF and its violent ways. In wake of Columbine, the National Rifle Association and the Republicans opponents of gun control were all but accused of having pulled the triggers. Ditto for pro-life Republicans who found themselves asked to forswear violence after a spate of abortion-clinic bombings. And what about Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, which post-Oklahoma City were held as having helped foment the violence of right-wing militia. So why isn't what's sauce for the GOP sauce for Team Gore?
Certainly it's not because of any shyness on ELF's part. A breakaway group from Earth First! that defines itself by a willingness to commit criminal acts to advance its political agenda, ELF has been growing bolder each year. From the tree spikings, demonstrations and graffiti sprayings of the early 1990s, ELF has graduated to arson. Joining forces with the Animal Liberation Front, it has inflicted costly damage on government offices, businesses and university research facilities.
Its most spectacular act of vandalism came in 1998, a $12 million blaze at the Vail Associates ski facility in Colorado set because ELF believed the resort a threat to the reintroduction of the lynx. This was preceded by a $2 million fire at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal Damage Control building outside Olympia, Washington. And it was followed by a fire that did $500,000 worth of damage to the Oregon headquarters of U.S. Forest Industries.
Still no outrage from Democrats angry that their good green name has been sullied by violence. Maybe that's because setting fire to corporate property doesn't rate that high on some progressive scales. Or maybe it's because there has yet to be any loss of human life--though this is probably but a matter of time. No one who sets a fire can control it, and firefighters who enter burning buildings know all too well the risk of things going tragically wrong. "This is not college prank stuff," Gordon Compton, FBI spokesman in Portland, assures us. "This falls within our domestic terrorism statutes."
So there we have it: "domestic terrorism" on behalf of a sacrosanct cause, committed by a group that makes no apologies for the millions in damage it has done and the risks to human life that inevitably attach to it. Only two years back Democrats were running ads suggesting that a vote for the GOP was a vote for burning black churches. Surely, then, in the interests of fairness we can expect Rosie O'Donnell and similar minds around the media to wonder if a vote for Al is a vote for ELF?
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