Re-Elect Al Gore

Al Gore needs a sports pyschologist. He's got that weird mental disorder going on, where he can't handle pressure. When he's running a campaign, he's this wooden, jerky beurocrat without a clue how to connect with people. When he's not actually doing anything requiring the public's support - his career now consists of growing a beard - he delivers stirring addresses. Today, in Washington, he gave a rather fiery speech calling for the Attorney General and the Congress to thoroughly investigate the White House's wiretapping of Americans without a court order.

I'd suggest you go and read the entire thing...but half of my audience is apparently half-literate racists, judging from the Google searches leading here today, so I wouldn't quite expect too much.

But I'll just pick out a few key sections, in case you've got other plans for the afternoon.

He opens by drawing a direct line from the illegal FBI wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. to Bush's illegal wiretapping of an unknown number of Americans.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

Gore then does something fairly amazing for a media figure in 2005 - he references the Founding Fathers in a way that is both responsible and, most importantly, accurate. I am so tired of idiots like Bill O'Reilly making up all sorts of fanciful lies about the origins of our Country (particularly that its odd blend of Enlightenment thinkers and Puritans was somehow a unified, traditional Judeo-Christian culture, whatever that means in the first place.)

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

Did he just actually quote an actual piece of writing composed by a real Founding Father? Can you imagine GWB even trying to class up his act like that?

"The President should be able to break all sorts of laws during wartime. I believe it was Samuel Adams Light who said, 'Thine Executive shalt be able to break all sorts of laws...umm...During the waging of wars, thou shalt, um, grant to the President...' Um, wait, hang on...Let me start over.

"The President should be able to break the law when you're at war. As that great Founding Father, Paul Bunyan, once said, 'The President should be able to break the law when, um, thine nation is at war.' Yeah, there you go."

Gore continues...

In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that "the law is king."

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America.

So, okay, it's rhetoric. But it's well-written rhetoric. Gore actually does have some real things to say, of course, but you have to wait until further along in the speech.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

YES! This is the sort of argument a lot more Democrats should have been making for years now. These guys are so incompetant that, even if you buy into the War on Terror (I don't), you'd have to agree that they can't be trusted to run the damn thing. All this crap, particularly the wiretapping that will lead to convicted terrorists being released and the torturing of prisoners that provides no beneficial information, hampers our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Gore takes Bush to task on a lot of specifics of the surveillance scandal, pointing out that the President's explanations make little to no sense.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

...

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

Despite what those lying weirdos on the right-wing blogs no one reads will tell you, torture and despotism aren't what America is all about, and they are not things for which George Bush and Sean Hannity will manage to drum up support. The problem we who oppose Bush Co. face is alerting as many Americans as possible that this is going on, and then of course to get them to vote Democrat this Fall.

Gore goes on to discuss the suspension of civil liberties during wars throughout US History. He notes that, no matter what kind of vacation from traditional freedoms the government took, they always halted these activities immediately once the conflict had ended.

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

He, and many others, worry that this cycle may stop with George Bush, who has managed to amass a rather unprecedented level of power. Mainly, the notion of an endless, ongoing "War on Terror" that neccessitates the adoption of liberty-limiting, invasive laws on a permanent level, troubles Gore (and me).

These are all excellent points to make, and I sincerely hope that some of this perspective seeps, however gradually, into the nation's discussions on this topic. The worst thing that could happen would be for teh NSA scandal to blend in with all the other illegal, immoral shit that Bush does, and become just another reason libruls hate the president. This is the sort of criminal outrage that ought to extend across any sort of flimsy "party line."

You know, like the president getting fellated.

As I said, it's a long speech, and I'm not going to paraphrase the whole thing. Gore touches on the Supreme Court, provides personal insight and more insights from the Founding Fathers (including that bane of the AP US History student, the Federalist Papers), and totally calls out Congress.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

Oh, snap! No he di-int.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"-must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Hell yeah. That's good stuff. Now I remember why we elected this guy back in 2000.