Re-Elect Gore

How do you know Al Gore just gave a great speech? Because the radical right wing attacks him. The RNC spokeswoman had this to say about Gore today:

Al Gore’s incessant need to insert himself in the headline of the day is almost as glaring as his lack of understanding of the threats facing America. While the president works to protect Americans from terrorists, Democrats deliver no solutions of their own, only diatribes laden with inaccuracies and anger.

RNC Chair Ken Mehlman also chimed in: "Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman said Gore is 'more interested in desperately trying to get attention than he is in focusing on the facts and the law.'"

Of course, Gore was speaking of a subject on which BushCo has even received criticism from other right wingers, and that subject is the PoliceStateGate Scandal:

Former Vice President Al Gore, charging that President Bush's record on civil liberties posed a "grave danger" to America's constitutional freedoms, urged the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.

In a detailed and impassioned speech sponsored by liberal and conservative groups on Monday, Gore said that while much remained unknown about the spying program, "What we do know . . . virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently."

I particularly liked this part of Gore's speech, where he explains exactly why following the rule of law is necessary:

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

Gore effectively summed up why Bush will go down in history as America's worst president. It is because Bush is essentially an "anti-American" -- someone who is more than willing to defy our nation's laws in order to pursue an agenda that is even too extreme for folks like former G.O.P. Congressman Bob Barr.

Not surprisingly, a majority of Americans aren't too happy with Bush either:

By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Zogby International, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,216 U.S. adults from January 9-12.

This poll must be particularly troubling for Bush, given that he has admitted that he wiretapped Americans without a judge's approval. And it doesn't look like Bush will be able to argue that his illegal wiretapping activity led to significant breakthroughs. From the New York Times:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

Bush seems to have a knack for wasting limited resources, whether it be requiring F.B.I. agents to needlessly check out floods of dead-end information, or bogging down a significant portion of the Army's combat strength in Iraq, a country that posed no threat to us.

Do you feel safer yet?