Al Gore Gone Wild!

Al Gore was giving a talk in Sweden yesterday, and offered up some interesting comments about what would be different had he been elected.

"We would not have invaded a country that didn't attack us," he said, referring to Iraq. H

e must have been referring to Iraq, because clearly Bosnia wouldn't apply. This is the same Al Gore who blamed Bush I for not finishing the job in Iraq back in 1991. Or is it the same Al Gore? I suppose it depends upon whether he's cheeking his medications again. Shortly after Bush II went after Iraq, I read a book written prior to that occasion that argued war was inevitable; it was written by a Middle East expert in the Clinton administration. He painted Gore and Albright as the Iraq hawks in the administration, trying to prod Clinton to pull the trigger and take out Saddam. Do you remember when they were seriously considering that? They had a town hall meeting in Ohio that was a disaster, with Albright taking the heat from the loony left, and the option was dropped like a hot potato. Yeah, foreign policy by town hall meeting ... were they serious?

"We would not have taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families."

This always cracks me up. Tax cuts, which favor the rich, who themselves receive no direct welfare payments from the government, and who bear an overwhelmingly dispropotionately high share of the total income tax burden per person even after the tax cuts, are equivalent to taking the money from the poor and giving it to the rich. Because it's the government's money, and therefore it should all go working families.

Do you remember in the 2000 election, when it was revealed that Al Gore had donated a couple hundred dollars in total to charity? He justified his paltry givings on the basis that it is a significant financial burden sending your children to Harvard. Kerry and Edwards were perhaps the richest presidential ticket in history, and these guys complain that the tax cuts are coming to them, as if they are therefore obliged to buy more yachts with the tax savings. Have these people ever heard of private charities? I'd venture to guess that most fabulously rich people are liberal Democrats - why do they live so lavishly? Is it that they don't care about poor people? I'd say so. It's more important that your kids go to Harvard.

"We would not be trying to control and intimidate the news media."

I'll venture tow guesses as to what he might be alluding to here: poor Dan Rather, and the imprisoning of reporters who refused to testify in the Plame investigation. So, in the first instance, when a major news organization gets fed made up evidence that is clearly fraudulent, and people point this out, it amounts to control and intimidation. In the second instance, it turns out that the testimony of the two reporters in question could be damaging to a key aid of the President and a key aid of the Vice President. So the prosecutorial zeal in this case serves this administration in what way?

"We would not be routinely torturing people," Gore said.

No, instead we'd just standby and watch that happen in other countries. Now this is a statement, over and above anything one could imagine him saying, that proves we made the right choice in 2000. His fragile ego apparently is so in need of being assuaged that he makes a gross, unfair, and despicable comment that can only steel the will of our enemies. We have punished those responsible for Abu Ghraib, and a bipartisan commission has said that the administration was not responsible, and yet Al Gore wants to pretend and give credence to the notion that we are running our own version of the Gulags. And he makes in Sweden, where he knows he might be thanked with a Nobel Prize, following the equally despicable example of Carter. I have very few good things to say about Clinton, as most of you know, but even in his criticisms of the administration, he's expressed opinions that I don't share, but not in a way that equates us unfairly with who and what we're fighting. Gore should be ashamed of himself, and we should all breathe a sigh of relief that he's reduced to pandering to a bunch of Northern European socialists.