Sunday, June 3, 2007

Tired of Waiting for Gore?

Then sign this petition and wave the bloody shirt.

I'm fed up with their surge, and I'm going with my own initial urge experienced in December of '04, (right after Kerry failed to retire the worst president in U.S. History). That's exactly when this vintage Gore '08 sticker went up on my vintage automobile.
Since 2000, nothing has been accomplished - certainly no 'mission' - but much has happened for Al Gore.

In these pages and others', I have long argued that Al Gore has nothing to win and everything to lose in having another go at the meat-grinder of Presidential politics. Against the backdrop (an amazingly appropriate expression) of the Bush-Cheney record, he has already demonstrated to historians that he is the greatest un-inaugurated president ever elected. If he does nothing more than what he is doing now, his increasingly exalted place in history is assured. The Economist put it this way:
Things just keep on getting better for Al Gore. He is not only a global-warming guru—the man who changed the climate of opinion on climate change—he is also an all-purpose political guru as well. He was mocked back in 2000 for accusing George Bush of “risky schemes”. Since then Mr Bush has turned into a Pandora's box of risky schemes. He was ridiculed in America back in 2002 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq. Few would ridicule him today. Europeans only have to look at Mr Gore (and these days there is slightly more of him to look at) to think of what life might have been like without the Toxic Texan. Surely he will soon have a Nobel peace prize to add to his Oscar.
So I have been asking every time Gore's name comes up, 'What's in it for him?' The obvious answer is that America needs Al Gore more than Al needs to be president. Or, as Eugene Robinson puts it, America Likes an Idiot, but It Needs Al Gore. I keep hearing snippets of brilliance. C-Span recently aired Gore's 50 impromptu minutes at George Washington University to which you can catch a link on SwiftSpeech. Trophy Wife Tivo-ed Charlie Rose's priceless interview for me, which you can grab on BlueMassGroup. (You can listen in the background while your 'Net surfing continues, as I am as I write this.)

Gore is the single candidate who is larger than the huge issues facing us. For me, he is the most prominent of the narrow circle of Democratic leaders who was right both on Gulf War I (1991) and on Bush's Invasion of Iraq (2003). He can speak to the importance of understanding how we got into Iraq-Nam; that understanding is essential to knowing how to extricate ourselves from that cluster-blunder as well as how to avoid additional ones. More than targeting Bush-Cheney, Inc., Gore's focus is on how phonies masquerading as wartime leaders were for so long tolerated by our media and a non-checking, non-balancing Congress. In a few short years he has established himself as an authority on American Media and its uncritical fraudcasting of errant political mythologies. Reason is the foundation of political democracy and Gore's critique, The Assault on Reason, seizes at the roots of the current American malaise. Gore speaks directly to the need to harness scientific methods to redress multi-faceted American crimes of commission and omission by “faith-based policies” in this short century. Not the least of these, of course, is Republicans' denial of An Inconvenient Truth, which is nothing short of appeasement of a future global holocaust.

Americans have been monstrously served in the last eight years. They deserve a momentously corrective change in course. They also have much for which to redeem themselves vis-a-vis the rest of the world. How better to accomplish this than by choosing the road not chosen for them before? How better to begin the reversal of the last eight years than with an absolute and unqualified repudiation of Bush and Cheney?

Let's be perfectly frank about it. We have been swift-boated and bitch-slapped for all of this short century. For Gore to become president would be for the earth-antagonist and government-hostile Republicans their worst nightmare. For Gore to become president eight years after the great train robbery in Florida would be a revenge served cold of Nixonian and Shakespearian proportions. Under a more positive interpretation, a Gore presidency would correct the course of American history and come the closest - of all Democratic alternatives - to annulling the Bush era.

If Al Gore gives us a second chance and chooses on 1-Nov-2007 to run for President, Americans cannot afford to decline his offer.

15 comments:

  1. Why not make Al an offer? What better way to sell his book?

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  2. Vigil:
    Re: "Bitch-slapping".

    This paragraph by Josh Michaels reminds me that we Progressives can no longer "make nice" with the Republican party which is adamantly striving to establish itself as a one-party imperial theocracy. Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person's supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who's receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.

    It also brings to mind the recent Opinion piece by Mark Danner in Friday's LA Times in which he discusses the assertion attributed to Karl Rove: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." In this 'new age', says Danner, 'Power has made reality its bitch'.

    Bush lives in a world of fantasy. He and his band of spinners, distorters, and liars have led our country down the proverbial garden path (all so he could be "A Wartime President".

    When will we have the courage to see what is real and to say aloud: 'I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore'. I'm going to beg, implore, woo, cajole, (whatever adjective you like) Al Gore, a man who not only is willing to acknowledge what is real, but who is willing (and oh-so able) to thoughtfully examine reality and consider SOLUTIONS to the many, MANY vexing issues facing our beloved country.

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  3. This is a wonderful, dreamy and beautiful post, Vigilante. I want to go with it. But Al Gore is an academic. He's brilliant, he's right, and he's moody and long winded. I saw him speak to a small group recently and I got the impression that he has no plans to run for President; I personally think he's too comfortable and too wise.

    I'm hoping that the revolution will happen with Edwards or Obama--OH, they'd make a great team. I worry a lot about Edwards safety because he is so clearly opposed to our corporate-run culture. It still floors me that both Kennedys were assassinated with relatively little controversy over it.

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  4. Urban Pink says,
    "I'm hoping that the revolution will happen with Edwards or Obama--OH, they'd make a great team. I worry a lot about Edwards safety because he is so clearly opposed to our corporate-run culture. It still floors me that both Kennedys were assassinated with relatively little controversy over it."
    --
    What planet do you live on ?
    He is a corporate Globalist who makes hundreds of millions of $.
    He sits on the board of a huge hedge fund. You are dreaming.
    ---
    emily said,
    "I'm going to beg, implore, woo, cajole, (whatever adjective you like) Al Gore, a man who not only is willing to acknowledge what is real, but who is willing (and oh-so able) to thoughtfully examine reality and consider SOLUTIONS to the many, MANY vexing issues facing our beloved country."
    -----
    Gore is not a creative person. He is an idiot who is capitalizing on name recognition to sell a book that not only does not introduce reality principles, it is a paean for the twisted class/caste brainwash and propaganda system we live in. He is a stooge for Globalism.
    Both of you ladies seem to think there is a significant difference between some of these named politicians, Dems and Repubs.
    Have a nice day in La La land.
    Hello suckers.
    The American public is slumbering.
    Maybe if the feed bag is taken off for a few days two marbles would roll around in the same direction.

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  5. Hillary will have to stumble (big time) before Gore comes in. (Half of all the Democrats are women who love her.) If that happens, Gore would be the indispensable ingredient to a 'stop Clinton' movement.

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  6. Absent the glorious return of Al (devoutly to be wished), I am moving in the direction of Bobama.

    Clinton II - absolutely not.

    Edwards - maybe (he did something unforgivable when he voted for war).

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  7. A cheap, tabloid shot, Boris. You should be ashamed.

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  8. On Hillary-bashing:

    I'm not a partisan pro-Clinton Progressive, but I am a stakeholder in the November 2008 election. I saw Carl Bernstein trying to promote his new biography in an interview with Charlie Rose. It was ineffectual. Rose is no dummy, usually does thorough homework and in this instance, clearly read between the lines of this opportunistic hack job. Bernstein will clearly make a lot of money. His targeted audience is well-heeled.

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  9. I back Obama. I heart Gore.

    Gore would be an idiot to join this race. It would be nice if he were an idiot (for that moment)...but he isn't.

    Mmmmm, a Gore-Obama ticket. That would be something....

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  10. Absolutely, M.D. No Clinton II. She did a decent job in the debate, but I can't forget that she, like Edwards, voted for the unprovoked war in which we are now enmeshed.

    Skip, I see your point, but think that Gore and Carter share commonality in that they do far more good out of politics than in it. I don't think Gore is an idiot, and haven't considered him as a candidate. But, I like the fact that he's brought the fact of global warming to the mainstream, despite the fact that he sits on a hedge fund and is probably in that upper 1% getting all the tax breaks.

    You and M.D. are off the scale intelligent and I respect both your opinions, also: not to exclude all the other astute observations from everyone here.

    But, speaking of slumbering and dreaming, my dream team is Gravel and Kucinich or Boxer (neither of whom voted to go to war). OK, I'm realistic enough to know that won't happen. >-[

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  11. Roger J. Stone, Jr. is a long-time Republican thug who stole the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000. Appearing Thursday night on CNN's Glenn Beck show, Stone says Gore

    ". . . . .is a giant compared to the Democrats who are running for president. His popularity is at an all-time high; he has turned out to be right as far as his party is concerned about the two major issues of the day — the war, where he's been the most articulate critic, and global warming, which is his signature issue that he was in the wilderness on and now everyone thinks it's true."

    Gore is the real anti-war candidate — right on the war from the beginning and with the stature to end the war. Barack Obama would kind of suction-off anti-war votes, and I'm not sure Gore can afford that. But he can afford to watch and see how Obama develops his opinions. If it looks like he can't take Hillary, there's only one person alive who can beat her for the nomination and that's Al Gore."

    . . . .the astonishing similarities between Gore and former President Richard Nixon, noting that both men served two terms in the House before moving to the Senate. As sitting vice presidents, both Nixon and Gore lost presidential elections by razor-thin margins after charges of fraud and vote stealing, and Stone noted, both were criticized for not utilizing the campaign services of their presidents, Eisenhower and Clinton respectively.

    . . . Nixon's ability to come back after suffering defeat in the 1960 election, which he called the "greatest political comeback in American political history, perhaps surpassed by Al Gore in 2008."

    Gore, he said, "has handled himself extremely well in these years out of office. He's pacing himself."

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  12. - Gore is just about the biggest dumb ass politician I can think of. He reminds me of Bush. A low level, uncreative, 2nd or 3rd tier thinker.
    Reform this system ?
    Not gonna happen.
    System change is needed.
    ---------
    A little knowledge is dangerous.
    Gore takes a few buzz words of 'environment' 'special interest' 'democracy' and turns them into a boring show of self aggrandizement
    ------
    Mainstream Politicos are the problem, and putting in another like this, would be sure disaster.
    Gores relative, Gore Vidal, who does have a brain, has had lots of intellectual fun mocking this idiot relative of his.
    Al Gore is only a dumbed down, egoistic, sad image of what some people conjecture as creativity in America.
    Cross posted in swift speech.

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  13. Who do you want in office skippy Nader? Gore is our best shot at getting somethings back on the table that need to be. Where did you get that bumper art Vigilante?

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