Cowboy Trent Set to Ride Roughshod. “As the law courts make ready the way for Bush Redux, the likes of Senator Lott are
emerging from those dark, cold places in which they were stored during the
governor’s campaign. It’s a wonder that the Gore team never did manage to point
out that the Clinton administration, for all its flaws, acted as a foil for the likes of the
cowboy-hat crowd, those faux populists who pose in denim and carry out the
businessman’s agenda of low labor costs and minimal government regulation. The
government shutdown in 1995 was but a metaphor for their fondest wishes, a world
without the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration,
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, etc. Why didn’t Al Gore make
this case, or make it better? Then again, why didn’t Al Gore do a lot of things, chief
among them: act like a human being?” New York Observer