This Was The Al Gore I 'Thought' I Knew

[Annie]

I used to like Al Gore, really. Not saying I would have voted for him, but there were some things he said that I agreed with. Damn if I could remember them, then saw this:

http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=49860

What Gore Doesn't Say

BY ELI LAKE
March 6, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/49860

Mark what Vice President Gore is not saying. At a moment when embracing the retreat from Iraq appears a prerequisite for attaining his party's presidential nomination, the Tennessean so many in his party are now drafting as a nominee has stayed mum on the question of withdrawal.

As the rest of the Democratic field dares itself to embrace an American betrayal at ever sooner deadlines, Mr. Gore barnstorms the country to raise the alarum about the weather. When asked about withdrawing troops from the war he urged his party to vote against in 2002, he dodges the question.

In an interview December 6 with Matthew Lauer, the former vice president was asked whether, were he president, he would favor a withdrawal. Mr. Gore made sure to say that the war was a "car-wreck" and that military victory was impossible. But as for whether he would cut and run, he said, "Well if I were president I would have the full flow of information and have and test each of these options."

So why is it that Hollywood's favorite Democrat would need more information to make a choice everyone in his party seems to have already accepted? Look no further than Mr. Gore's September 23, 2002, address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, a speech that launched his transformation from goofy Columbia professor to anti-war hero. In it he said that one of the reasons he opposed the intervention, was because he did not trust President Bush to stay in Iraq once the Baathist state was dismantled.

"If we go in there and dismantle them — and they deserve to be dismantled — but then we wash our hands of it and walk away and leave it in a situation of chaos, and say, ‘That's for y'all to decide how to put things back together now,' that hurts us," Mr. Gore said. This, incidentally, is the inverse of how Senator Obama advertises today on the stump his early Iraq war opposition. Mr. Obama says today, "I believed that giving this President the open-ended authority to invade Iraq would lead to the open-ended occupation we find ourselves in today."

This may sound hard to believe in light of Mr. Gore's subsequent moveon.org speeches, in which he played to the passions of his camp's national security Sistah Souljahs, but Mr. Gore has long had some of the feathers of a hawk. That's right, Mr. Gore is a tag 'em and bag 'em tough guy, a former vice president who endorsed the rendition of terrorists for interrogation, not to mention the bombing of Serbia and Iraq.

When Mr. Gore was a senator, he asked his colleagues to demand the State Department hold Yasser Arafat accountable for ordering the murder of America's ambassador to Sudan, Cleo Noel, in 1973. When he signed these letters to his colleagues, already some American Jews were beginning the secret negotiations in Norway that led to rehabilitation of Arafat's international reputation, a reputation enhanced by the Clinton administration's fixation with the Oslo process.

Certainly, Mr. Gore has a record that falls far short of perfect. On May 26, 2004, in his shrillest speech to moveon.org, he laced into Ahmad Chalabi, bringing up the outstanding conviction by a Jordanian military court for embezzling $70 million and the anonymously sourced stories at the time alleging the former Iraqi exile leader had passed secrets to the Iranians.

Mr. Gore had to have known of Mr. Chalabi's connections with Tehran and the Jordanian charges in 2000, when, as a presidential candidate, he promised, in a letter to Mr. Chalabi, to help protect the democratic forces of Iraq. It was Mr. Gore who in 1996 was sent to smooth the Iraqi opposition's feathers when the Clinton administration infamously failed to respond to Saddam's invasion of their northern Iraqi sanctuary.

More often than not, at least throughout Mr. Gore's career, he has been closer than most modern Democrats to the Scoop Jackson and Harry Truman tradition. Mr. Gore has been an idealist, a defender of Israel, and unafraid to deploy American force in the interest of noble American values.

He voted for the first Gulf War, when there were far more leaders in his party who opposed it. Today Mr. Gore basks in the adoring love of the activists who tried and failed to knock off his running mate in 2000, Senator Lieberman. Strategically it cannot be stressed enough that Mr. Gore's 30-year war against carbon emissions will end when we discover the alternative energies to bankrupt the Persian Gulf 's kings and ayatollahs.

Mr. Gore's record in public life aside, he is also a far shrewder politician than many are willing to admit. This Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Oscar winner must know that Americans — when faced in a presidential election with a choice between a dove and a hawk — have chosen the hawk every time since Johnson beat Goldwater. Even in 1976, Jimmy Carter, who became America's most supine commander in chief, won an easy contest against a president who at the time was afraid to meet publicly with Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

And at the end of the day, this may be the most inconvenient truth of all for those frantically trying to draft Mr. Gore to run for the White House.

 

[Adam's Apple]

His TN values took a hike when he hooked up with the Clintons