COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Republicans in the Embrace of Bad Metaphors : With Baghdad out of the bombsights, maybe the GOP can get mileage from Woody Allen.

Backs to the wall, the Republicans massed here under the Astrodome are pulling out all the stops. No blow too low, no slur too vile, no metaphor too blurry.

Take Bruce Herschensohn, the TV pundit running against Barbara Boxer for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Alan Cranston. “Now like an octopus hiding its tentacles in the dark,” Herschensohn warned the convention, “the leadership of the Democrats smile and tell you to close your eyes and sleep and dream, dream of glorious services they will provide, dream while the octopus, wide awake, sits quietly, never taking its eyes away from your wallet left on the night-table.”

This raises troubling questions about the location of the octopus, the night-table and the victim whose wallet is purloined. Were they all under water?

“As the second thousand years of our calendar come to a close,” Herschensohn went on, “all of us will become the architects who design the upper steps of that wide staircase leading to the year 2000 and the top of that staircase will be guarded by either the octopus or the eagle.” But if the octopus is at the top of the stairs, tentacles akimbo to thwart progress to higher things, how can it also be maintaining its vigil at the night-table?

As has been widely noted, Christian fundamentalists are providing the main ideological sinews for Republicanism as it heads toward the wide staircase, the year 2000, and the octopus threat. Observers of the debates on the wording of the Republican platform are still wagging their heads over the spirited performance of Richard Stoffel, a delegate from Alaska who opposed the phrase “humanitarian aid” in connection with the plight of Jews from the former Soviet Union on the grounds that it was evidence of creeping secular humanism and New Age contagion.

These Christians are embarrassing to more conventional Republicans who fear that their party may be perceived by the electorate to be out of step with the times, but they do offer a coherent philosophy.

“God’s laws concerning economics should be consistently held to and applied by civil government,” said one piece of campaign literature thrust upon me by a Christian in the Astrodome, “including those biblical principles commonly referred to as ‘free enterprise,’ some elements of which include prohibitions against excessive taxation, government indebtedness, governmental theft via debasement of the currency, inflation, and immoral wealth distribution.”

Since I was wearing press credentials, the Christian had me figured as a secular humanist and was astounded when I sang him a verse from Hymns Ancient and Modern, buttressing his position: “The rich man in his castle,/ The poor man at his gate,/ God made them high and lowly,/ He ordered their estate.” The Bible endorses a truly flat tax, enjoining rich and poor to be mulcted in the same sum.

It’s touching how eager Republicans are to receive biblical or similarly weighty endorsement for the idea that it’s OK to be filthy rich. With his acute political antennae, Ronald Reagan sensed this and gave the delegates the fake Abraham Lincoln quote that he’s been using for years: “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.” This advice was written by the Rev. W.J.H. Boetcker around the turn of the century. He issued it and similar injunctions in a pamphlet also containing material from Lincoln.

Republican strategy going into the convention was clear enough. Bomb Baghdad, assert that the Democrats have been running the economy for the last 12 years, call for change.

Bombing Baghdad’s ministries (many of which are in fact empty) moved to the top of the campaign agenda about five days before the convention opened. That master strategist, James A. Baker III, probably realized that a big bang in Baghdad beats lower capital-gains tax rates as a way to get the attention of the American people. The plan, according to the British Independent newspaper, was to have a squad of U.N. inspectors demanding entry to an Iraqi ministry at noon, Baghdad time, on the opening day of the convention. Assuming non-cooperation on Saddam Hussein’s part, thrilling ultimatums would have filled out the next two days until Bush’s speech coincided with the bombs dropping. After leaks to the press, that campaign strategy had to be put on hold.

In the nick of time, Woody Allen came to the rescue, fusing the themes of secular humanism, family destruction and, given Mia Farrow’s birthing of the Evil One in “Rosemary’s Baby,” Satanism. All that remains for Roger Ailes--master Republican propagandist, freshly re-recruited--is to unearth photographs of Bill Clinton and Woody Allen standing next to each other.