I understand that the audience for Al Gore's speech yesterday was a crowd made up predominantly of dedicated Bush-haters, and Al was eager to toss them some raw meat, but the rhetoric was so comically hyperbolic that it might just as easily have been an SNL skit. But this man is beyond parody.
The RNC loves it when Gore presumes to speak for the Democrats, and they had a response ready to point out some previous statements by Gore from when he actually served in government. And others, including Byron York, had much more able analysis than I could offer. But I did grab a few snippets at random from the full text of the speech to demonstrate how Gore just can't resist that extra adjective or adverb, resulting in a distortion of any reality observed by Earth people:(emphasis mine)
...the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue...
actually Al, the number is about 500 total that were suspected of contacts with al Qaeda figures, and we don't have a good idea yet how many of those were American citizens...
...just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States."...
well, if 1.7 ten-thousandths of one percent of Americans is "large numbers", then you got me...
..as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.
...you mean he didn't promise to stop listening to al Qaeda conversations once secret national security information was illegally leaked by his political enemies?
...What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.
you mean even though you have no evidence that the law has been broken, we should all be compelled to this conclusion...virtually?
...It is this same disrespect for America’s Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution.
Have metaphors ever been mixed so maliciously?..."to the brink of a... breach in the fabric..." Isn't that what happened to Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl?
Then there are the statements that depart from hyperbole and roll right into fiction...
The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.
Down boy!
Here's more from the Byron York piece on Gore's covering of all the bases:
amid all the accusing and prescribing, Gore uttered those few words about the president's "inherent power" to take "unilateral action" during an emergency. No matter what else he said, Gore flatly declared that the president has the inherent authority to do what he believes is necessary to defend the country. While the crowd sat on its hands — what's he saying? — the statement shouldn't have been a surprise. Gore is, after all, the former vice president of an administration that claimed the inherent authority to order national-security break-ins without a warrant. Even when the administration supported placing such break-ins under FISA restrictions, it still claimed the inherent authority to do them unilaterally, if the president thought necessary......he devoted a good deal of time to discussing the history of curtailments of civil liberties during the course of American history. First there were the Alien and Sedition Acts, and then Lincoln and suspension of habeas corpus, and then Wilson and the Palmer Raids. And then came the second World War. "The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive," Gore said. "And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. [Martin Luther] King and thousands of others." After each episode, Gore explained, when "the conflict and turmoil subsided," Americans reflected on what had been done and "absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret."
Yet later in the speech, Gore credited earlier generations with resisting the temptation to curtail rights, even in the face of grave dangers like World War II and the Cold War. "Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice?" Gore asked. "Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march — when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?" Not at all, Gore said. "It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same."
Well, which was it? Did members of earlier generations "faithfully protect" our liberties, or did they set up COINTELPRO and intern Japanese Americans? Gore said both things, just a few minutes apart. It was, in a way, characteristic of his entire speech. Unilateral presidential action is illegal and it's legal. Leaks are bad and they're good. Previous generations curtailed our rights and they didn't.
No matter. The crowd was thrilled.
As always, what is absent from all the screeching from Al Gore and others on the Left about the NSA program is any hint of an acknowledgement that President Bush might have been acting in good faith to protect Americans from another terrorist attack. Again as usual, he cannot be merely disagreed with, he must be demonized.
Related:
Transcript of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales interview on The Larry King Show
Strata-Sphere post on NYT backtracking on NSA story (via Power Line)
Jeff Goldstein translates the text of the ACLU lawsuit against the NSA program. (via Michelle Malkin)
Jonah Goldberg's reaction to the Gore speech.
Posted by dan at January 17, 2006 01:42 AM | TrackBack