MORE GORE

No,this isn't a movie review of Kill Bill.

By now Gore's Nov. 9 speech, co-sponsored by MoveOn.org and the American Constitution Society, is buzzed all over the net.

MoveOn's description of the speech is understatement: "Mr. Gore described the Administration's assault on our civil liberties as un-American and will charge that the Bush/Ashcroft attack on the Constitution is actually a smokescreen that obscures the Administration’s fundamental failure to meaningfully protect our national security, and that their efforts have weakened rather than strengthened America." An excerpt follows below.

You can read (or hear) the speech here: http://www.moveon.org/gore/speech2.html

Two thoughts come to mind.

First, reading this terrific and hopeful speech makes me even more disgruntled at Gore's dismal campaigning back during the coup d'etat of 2000, and Nader's vengeful attacks on the Democrats. Why couldn't Gore have spoken this clearly and eloquently back then?

And second, why can't any of the Democratic candidates talk this way?

Politics and elections as usual disappeared three years ago. So a Draft Gore movement is not as absurd as it would have sounded a few years back, or as portrayed by opposing vested interests. Pundits have claimed it would open old wounds, yada yada. Oh, let's do!

But the Gore we hear from today is way up the evolutionary scale from the one we heard and saw three years ago, while his simian adversary has continued to devolve.

It still may be quixotic, but there are many websites devoted to a draft. A Google search for
"draft Gore" finds dozens. http://www.electgore04.com says "Gone is the stiff, formal Senator/Vice President, Al Gore clearly loved being with the people and the people loved being with him. There is a genuine connection between the man and his message and the people.There is ample evidence that a presidential draft of Al Gore is do-able – the election of Theodore Roosevelt, the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Barry Goldwater draft movement are proof that it can be, and has been, done in modern times."

Some close friends have latched onto another latecomer, General Clark, who for all that tardiness, is making reasonable advances.

Gore, in this and prior speeches (linked at the MoveOn site) has shown that he had the potential to be the best Democratic president since FDR. His views are clearly more progressive than those of Clinton, who, like Jimmy Carter, should be saying these things loudly and consistently.

So far Gore has resisted any calls to run. Maybe he needs more prodding.

The excerpt:
"I want to challenge the Bush Administration's implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists.

Because it is simply not true.

In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.

In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.

In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.

In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.

In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America.

In both cases, they have used unprecedented secrecy and deception in order to avoid accountability to the Congress, the Courts, the press and the people.

Indeed, this Administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head. A government of and for the people is supposed to be generally open to public scrutiny by the people while the private information of the people themselves should be routinely protected from government intrusion.

But instead, this Administration is seeking to conduct its work in secret even as it demands broad unfettered access to personal information about American citizens. Under the rubric of protecting national security, they have obtained new powers to gather information from citizens and to keep it secret. Yet at the same time they themselves refuse to disclose information that is highly relevant to the war against terrorism.

They are even arrogantly refusing to provide information about 9/11 that is in their possession to the 9/11 Commission, the lawful investigative body charged with examining not only the performance of the Bush Administration, but also the actions of the prior Administration in which I served. The whole point is to learn all we can about preventing future terrorist attacks,

Two days ago, the Commission was forced to issue a subpoena to the Pentagon, which has disgracefully put Secretary Rumsfeld's desire to avoid embarrassment ahead of the nation's need to learn how we can best avoid future terrorist attacks. The Commission also served notice that it will issue a subpoena to the White House if the President continues to withhold information essential to the investigation.

And the White House is also refusing to respond to repeated bipartisan Congressional requests for information about 9/11, even though the Congress is simply exercising its Constitutional oversight authority. In the words of Senator Main, 'Excessive administration secrecy on issues related to the September 11 attacks feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government.'

In a revealing move, just three days ago, the White House asked the Republican leadership of the Senate to shut down the Intelligence Committee's investigation of 9/11 based on a trivial political dispute. Apparently the President is anxious to keep the Congress from seeing what are said to have been clear, strong and explicit warnings directly to him a few weeks before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial airliners and use them to attack us.

Astonishingly, the Republican Senate leadership quickly complied with the President's request. Such obedience and complicity in what looks like a cover-up from the majority party in a separate and supposedly co-equal branch of government makes it seem like a very long time ago when a Republican Attorney General and his deputy resigned rather than comply with an order to fire the special prosecutor investigating Richard Nixon.

In an even more brazen move, more than two years after they rounded up over 1,200 individuals of Arab descent, they still refuse to release the names of the individuals they detained, even though virtually every one of those arrested has been "cleared" by the FBI of any connection to terrorism and there is absolutely no national security justification for keeping the names secret. Yet at the same time, White House officials themselves leaked the name of a CIA operative serving the country, in clear violation of the law, in an effort to get at her husband, who had angered them by disclosing that the President had relied on forged evidence in his state of the union address as part of his effort to convince the country that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of building nuclear weapons."

More Gore.