Column: Why We Should Pay Attention to Al Gore
As is customary with career pols, he voiced this conclusion from a euphemistic posture, saying more times than "lockbox" that the president willfully and repeatedly has imposed "false impressions" on the American people -- not to mention the world. Still, Gore can be forgiven the rather tiresome game of euphemistic gyrations. As drama critic and fellow Tennesseean Joseph Wood Krutch once observed, "Any euphemism ceases to be euphemistic after a time." In short, the erstwhile Veep's unadorned message was loud and clear. George W. Bush lies his tush off.
I use the word "extraordinary" to describe Gore's speech for two other reasons as well. First, its thoughtful yet intense condemnation came from a moderate. The Bush camp will spin his words as typical leftist hysteria, of course, but Al Gore is no more a New Lefter or McGovern Liberal than the chair I'm sitting in. He's as middle-of-the-road as they come, and a plurality of voters understood that in 2000. And after a hellish 3 years of W.'s unwavering radicalism, the "moderate" case can now be made more forcefully than ever.
Hence the spoken truth about W. has transcended the easily assailable and hugely vulnerable Howard Deans of the opposition. The heretofore dozing and gutless giant that is the Democratic Establishment is stirring -- at last.
Even more extraordinary about Gore's speech, however, was that he placed his point-by-point critique of the Bush administration in broad context. Gore went far beyond merely itemizing how Bush II has been wrong about this, wrong about that, has lied about this and lied about that -- which it has. Every presidential administration has lied from time to time (and sometimes for good reason) and every one of them has engaged in "rhetorical excesses," as the speaker himself confessed. That's just politics.
"But," said Gore with precise logic and historical justification, "there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty." Systematic, manipulative, totalistic, blithely ideological and fundamentally dishonest: these are descriptions whose implications for a representative democracy are historically, and presently, horrifying.
Gore further likened the administration to a "propaganda machine" hellbent on promoting "mythologies that grow out of … one central doctrine." You don't have to be a History Channel addict to get the point.
Indeed, Mr. Gore essentially labeled the administration a criminal cabal and international rogue. With respect to the domestic and fiscal front, he cited a Nobel Prize-winning economist as saying "this is the worst government the U.S. has ever had in its more than 200 years of history…. What we have here is a form of looting." Any form of looting is criminal. And Gore's castigating reference to America's "first pre-emptive war" spoke for itself.
Combine select-circle criminality with militaristic roguery, add a liberal dose of propagandistic inclinations, and you tell me what you get.
Despite his blanket denials, Al Gore may yet challenge George Bush. The former concluded his speech by encapsulating the Clinton-Gore administration's successes -- exactly, come to think of it, what so many urged him to do back in 2000. Once again, you don't need to be a history junkie to read between those lines.
© Copyright 2003 P. M. Carpenter
Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.
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