WE’RE only one week past what we sore-headed McCainiacs refer to as Black Tuesday, but already, Al Gore is making it pathetically easy to embrace George W. Bush.
Events of the past few days on the campaign-finance front have thrown Bush’s most attractive quality — that he is not Al Gore — into sharp relief.
Americans sick of Clinton-Gore weaseling heard McCain’s calls for campaign-finance reform (which most voters don’t care about) as indicative of the candidate’s general intentions to fumigate the Justice Department and delouse the Lincoln Bedroom.
Clearly, McCain was the more likely GOP contender to carry out the necessary purgation of the body politic.
That mantle has now passed to Bush. The Maria Hsia convictions, the LaBella memorandum and the veep’s brashly cynical response to both developments reminds McCain supporters how vital it is to throw that Clinton-Gore lot out no matter what.
The verdict returned against Hsia means that a longtime Gore friend and key fund-raiser stands convicted on five felony counts of illegally funneling cash into Democratic Party coffers.
Hsia committed her crime at the now-infamous 1996 Buddhist temple fund-raiser, which Gore claims not to have realized was a funny-money cakewalk.
But a curious paper trail, as well as a secret 1998 Justice Department memo indicates Gore is almost certainly lying.
In the memo, Charles LaBella, then Justice’s top campaign-finance investigator, argued that Gore, the president and the first lady knew far more about the true nature of the Clinton-Gore campaign’s fund-raising than they admitted.
LaBella did not allege specific crimes, but made a strong case on available evidence that an independent counsel was needed to look into matters further.
What’s more, LaBella said top Justice officials were going out of their way to avoid this conclusion, all in an effort to protect the White House — and, presumably, the political careers of Al and Hillary.
Both the veep and the first lady may well owe their current candidacies to Attorney General Janet Reno’s outrageous refusal to do her job.
If Gore becomes president, Reno will slink off to spend the rest of her life pondering her disgraceful legacy, but the ruinous politicization of the Justice Department will certainly continue.
Any hope Gore or either of the Clintons will ever have to answer for their actions in court will be shredded.
In the wake of the Hsia convictions and the LaBella leak, Gore has decided to pose as a born-again campaign-finance reformer.
This is like Madonna coming out for the virtues of chastity, or Bob Jones taking up the grand marshal’s baton in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
“I have learned from my mistakes,” Gore told the Los Angeles Times. “Like John McCain, I bring the passion that comes from personal experience to the battle for campaign-finance reform.”
What rot. McCain had to submit to an independent counsel’s investigation of his role in the Keating Five scandal. He was wholly exonerated, but was so rattled by even the appearance of impropriety that he made campaign-finance reform a crusade.
To borrow a phrase, when chutzpah hits $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights to Al Gore’s soul.
Candidate Gore’s shameless new appeal to voters brings to mind the old folk tale of the Little Girl and the Snake, in which a crafty Snake asked a Little Girl to pick him up and coddle him.
“No way,” said the Little Girl. “Your kind is poisonous. You lie. You’ll bite me.”
“Oh, but I’ve changed,” the Snake replied. “I’ve learned from my mistakes. You can trust me.”
The Little Girl decided maybe the Snake did deserve another chance. As soon as she picked the Snake up, he sank his fangs into her arm.
“You said you weren’t like that!” she wailed.
“Don’t be silly, child. You knew what my nature was all along,” the Snake said, and slithered away.
e-mail: dreher@nypost.com