You Go...Gore

Al Gore remembered Martin Luther King Jr., with a speech defending the civil rights by which our country was once distinguished from others. He gave the speech at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C.

The notice was published in the “Washington Post” and penned by Chris Cillizza. Barely making the cut, Gore’s occasional blasts of criticism draw their legitimacy from the mainstream and civic support the former vice president enjoys as a public servant and intellectual.

The forceful nature of Gore’s remarks serve both to fuel the media’s insistence that he’s been embittered by his notorious defeat, and claims from the left that their opinions of the reigning emperor are shared by men cut from more moderate clothe – like a former senator from Tennessee.

Gore told his audience that [p]resident Bush broke the law in authorizing wiretaps without court approval and called it a “shameful exercise of power.”

He said, “The president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.”

According to the piece, Gore linked the eavesdropping program to the deceptive claim Iraq possessed the means of making mushroom clouds in American cities, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, and the embarrassing campaign to allow torture.

“The disrespect,” Gore said, “embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to Americans in both political parties.”

The article, commendable for covering a worthwhile American, later deteriorates into a discussion of polling that show Americans split on the question of illegal wiretapping. It talks about our current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales suggesting the administration has seen something in the law no prior executive did, and determined it has not only the legal right to do so, but “the duty” to protect Americans.

Protect you by spying on you.

Cillizza then called the Republican National Committee for the usual potshot at Gore’s character.


This is what Tracey Schmitt came up with: “Al Gore’s incessant need to insert himself in the headline of the day is almost as glaring as his lack of understanding of the threats facing America.”

Which is quite safe and good as saying nothing at all.

Disdaining Gore on the one hand, and dispatching Gonzales (the nation’s top enforcement guy) to dispatch with his comments on the other, the administration made use of its media wet nurse, Fox News, and its milk maid, Sean Hannity as bullhorn.

Gonzales used that bullhorn to call Gore a hypocrite, pointing out that somewhere at some point, the Clinton administration had employed an unauthorized tap somewhere, at some point.

The is what passes for statesman-like behavior under the ruling imperial party. The (r)epublicans’ debate wreaks of the back room and the school yard. The face they put on their public comment is that of the carnival barker or the clown.

The only thing missing was a link between Gore’s remarks and the ACLU’s lawsuit against the administration’s little plan for the American populace. Another vast left wing conspiracy to tie the (p)resident’s hands.

Here’s a link to the piece:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600526.html

Elsewhere, Bush was remembering King by noting how his vision had yet to be realized and later spent to the day promoting national policies to keep it that way.