Al Gore

By Dave Lindorff

    I remember back in 1970, when I was a student and anti-war activist in Connecticut, watching an ad on TV for Lowell Weicker, who was running for US Senate. The ad was very powerful: It showed Weicker playing in the yard with his son, who looked like he was maybe 10 or 12.  Weicker was saying that when his son was a tot, the US was fighting in Vietnam, and he didn’t want us to be fighting there when his son reached draft age.  

I voted for Weicker, a Republican who went on to win a Senate seat where he played a key role in helping to bring an end to the Nixon presidency.

As it happens, the Vietnam War ended five years later, when Weicker’s son was probably 17. He didn’t get drafted, but I remain struck by the fact that we could, back then, even contemplate the idea of being at war for so long.

He's for single-payer health care.

He'd restore the Fourth Amendment.

He favors leaving Iraq "as quickly as possible" and seems to possibly understand that our presence there is the root of the violence.

Will he throw out NAFTA??

Paul Krugman mostly nails it:

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

Sen. Barbara Boxer smacks down Global Warming denier James Inhofe during Al Gore's appearance before the Senate: PRICELESS!...

From the Huffington Post:

BRENT BUDOWSKY

Al Gore For President: The Man Meets The Moment

Imagine this: a President of the United States with vast domestic and international experience who would aspire to unify the American people, uplift a reformed American politics, and inspire friends of freedom and democracy everywhere.

Imagine: a President who would assume office with commander in chief quality experience who would be trusted on matters of war and peace; and with a temperament that respects the breadth and diversity of the American Family and brings people together in common cause...

MORE MORE MORE

Ever since I started blogging I've had an almost-daily sense of gratitude for Crooks and Liars, the site that makes it possible for us to miss great things on television -- but only for a few hours.

Al Gore opened Saturday Night Live last night with an Oval Office address to the nation that assumed we did not have a criminal Supreme Court in 2000 and that he has been president for the last six years. You really need to watch this clip. An excerpt:

Right now, in the 2nd week of May 2006, we are facing perhaps the worst gas crisis in history.

We have way too much gasoline. Gas is down to $0.19 a gallon and the oil companies are hurting.

As I've said many times in the last few years, the scariest thing about the 2000 presidential election was that Bush almost won.

Without rehashing the argument over what was most assuredly a stolen presidential election that year, it's got to be difficult for even the most slack-jawed, Neanderthal conservative to not admit that the United States would look much better today if Al Gore had been able to assume the office he rightfully won.

And here's Richard Cohen in the Washington Post today with a column about Gore's ongoing environmental activism, his new movie on the calamity we are moving toward and, on an interesting note, the idea of Gore being the political Comeback Kid of all time in 2008. Here's Cohen on Gore:

We need Democrats to fight the right wing. Who cares whether they've been in the military or not? Having been in the military doesn't confer special privileges, just as my civilian service in Vietnam doesn’t give me any special privileges, though it sometimes shuts up the right-wing crazies when I send them to the page that has the citation for my medal.

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