A POSITIVELY GOREWELLIAN SPEECH

At a time when President Bush leaves me feeling somewhat depressed to be a Republican, former Vice-President Gore comes along to remind me to be glad that I am not a Democrat.

Gore’s speech yesterday is itself a microcosm of what is wrong with the leadership of the Democratic Party and why as a result Bush is free to make all kinds of boneheaded mistakes without much fear.

Gore focused primarily on the dangers to American democracy posed by a lack of national debate to inform the American people of their government’s policies:

“On the eve of the nation’s decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: “Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?”

The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, “The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”

But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd’s question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?”

You can read this statement essentially as ” Because my party lost this debate, therefore it did not happen”. I’m not sure where Mr. Gore was in the year prior to the invasion of Iraq but I saw little else in my newspapers, magazines and in the blogosphere than debate about the war – very passionate debate on both sides – across the country and the world. This is a bizarrely counterfactual assertion by Gore.

“Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd’s two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don’t feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TVcommercials for their next re-election campaign.”

No. The Democratic Senators did not make a case because they had none to make, other than the ones committed out of long political philosophy to an antiwar Left position. The Clinton administration, of which Mr. Gore was part, came very close to toppling Saddam in 1998 with Operation Desert Fox and helped drive Slobodan Milosevic from power with the Kosovo War in 1999 ( which I favored incidentally) with strong support from Democratic senators. The real underlying beef these senators had was the political affiliation of the incumbent in the White House, not any matter of principle or even foreign policy objective since regime change was already U.S. policy before Bush came in to office. The Clinton administration also fiddled around with some CIA orchestrated coups ( using Ahmed Chalabi no less) against Saddam but after goading the Kurds into revolt, left them hanging under Republican Guard fire and ( unsuccessfully) tried to pin the blame on the low-level CIA field operative in Kurdistan.

Wonder if Al had any fingers in that debacle ? Never mind, back to the speech….

“In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was – at least for a short time – a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans – including some journalists – that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded. “

Translation. The coverage was virulently anti-Bush. To an extent this was deservedly so but the MSM was also very inaccurate and wildly sensationalistic but I suppose ” a higher truth” was being served and that’s what counted.

“…Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation’s leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar”

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