Pardon me, Other Charlotte, for not shedding a tear of sorrow as you do at Al Gore’s Yeagh! Moment yesterday when he screamed and yelled and called for the resignation of about 100 different Bush administration officials in a speech at New York University sponsored by MoveOn.org, the George Soros-funded outfit that equates G.W. Bush with Adolf Hitler. (See TOC’s The Saddest Story in American Politics down this page today.)
Me, I’m laughing instead. How can I not? Gore called on Bush to “condemn” (Gore’s word) Rush Limbaugh, for heaven’s sake! Rush Limbaugh! A talk-show host! The president of the United States is supposed to take time out from his busy schedule to tut-tut a private citizen. Apparently Rush doesn’t think that the Abu Ghraib prison scandals are quite the blanket indictment of all America that Al thinks they are. Oh, and Gore also seems to be the only person in America who actually believes the faux-science of the upcoming global-warming/global-freezing flick The Day After Tomorrow (see the dumb stuff Gore said about glaciers below).
And Rush, like me, thinks it’s shocking for a former vice president of the United States to have accused a sitting president of the United States during wartime of willfully putting American lives at needless risk. Here is what Yahoo News reported Gore told MoveOn (thanks, Drudge, for the links):
“President Bush..’has exposed Americans abroad and Americans in every town and city to a greater danger of attacks by terrorists because of his arrogance, willfulness and bungling at stirring up hornets’ nests that pose no threat whatsoever to us,’ Gore said.
“Gore said that because of the war, Iraq has ‘become the central recruiting office for terrorists.’ The administration, he said, has also set up U.S. soldiers for ‘payback the next time they are held as prisoners.'”
In my book, that’s virtually inviting the terrorists to take reprisals against Americans.
Fortunately, Rush is also having some chuckles at the speech. He’s also pretty indignant, writing this on his website:
“[Gore] starts talking about conferring more rights on the kind of people who want to murder tens of thousands more Americans than he does seem interested in dealing with the people who want to commit those murders. He has succeeded in giving our adversaries in Europe and our enemies in the caves of Afghanistan and the allies of Iraq a message that they’ll take to heart, and that is that we are not a united nation, that we do not have the will to win this war, and that we are weak and indecisive. That’s the message that Gore sends today, and it’s the wrong message, because it’s a lie, and beyond that it is an outrage.
“I don’t think anything of this kind has ever been done by a former vice president during a war, but our adversaries and our enemies would be badly mistaken if they actually believe that Gore speaks for this nation, because he doesn’t. I speak for more of this nation than Algore does, and I will say it on this program. Otherwise, why is he bothering to mention my name? He speaks for the radical fringe in his party who have become more and more the mainstream of his party. They are the Hate-America First radical left, and I hope the American people get to hear all of this speech. I hope it’s played over and over again, for this is how low Gore and his crowd are willing to go to undermine the war effort and our troops and this president to promote themselves and their own agenda and get themselves back into power.”
Sure, Al Gore was once–or at least once played the part of, in his St. Alban’s School Stiff way–a better man. He married Tipper Gore, for one thing, a down-to-earth and decent-hearted mother who was always my favorite of the Fab White House Four during the Clinton years (she got roundly booed by the left, of course, for pointing out that a lot of rock lyrics aren’t fit for kids’ consumption). Gore once actually represented the views of his patriotic, socially conservative Tennessee constitutents. He was strong on defense and a moderate on social policy. But a tragic figure? I’m sorry, but Al Gore is just plain ridiculous these days–when he’s not an out-and-out rhetorical threat to national security. My reaction to him isn’t pity but fear.
Al does have one major fan, however: Tina Brown, the unemployed Brit editor and Washington Post columnist. Tina went to Gore’s speech and came away all misty-eyed and hopeful:
“When he got up to do his thing, it was a welcome transformation from Gore 2000. In the first half of the Bush presidency, when you ran into Gore toting his laptop at an airport he looked as fat and unhappy as you would expect of someone who has exchanged Air Force One for an aisle seat in business class. But something has happened in the years of psychic pain and family affirmation that no hectoring political handler could ever produce when he was on the campaign trail. Al Gore has finally broken out.
“Perhaps it’s his spiritual affinity with the geeky MoveOn crowd that’s done it. Instead of seeing him as a spent political force, their interest makes him feel like Bob Dylan jamming with a younger band. It allows him to unleash the knowledge and the fluent passions of an authentic self he was always too politically inhibited to reveal before. ‘Glaciers don’t care about politics,’ he told us happily. ‘They really don’t. They are extremely objective. They just melt or freeze based on the world’s temperature.’…
“All that buoyant self-assurance, smoking anger and unused expertise are better late than never.
“Maybe, after all, Gore still has a political sequel.”
Maybe for you, Tina. The rest of us are wondering whether global warming hasn’t baked your man’s brain.