Unhinged - Al Gore on MLK Day

Nowadays, Al Gore's primary role in American politics is to give a mainstream Democratic voice to the George Soros and Moveon.org left. Well, Mr. Gore has done it again. In the same "He betrayed this country" manner, Al Gore uncorked a scorching speech that few others would dare to give. This is a very irresponsible, former Vice-President of the United States. It is very easy for him, from the cheap seats, to prejudge the President's post 9/11 actions regarding electronic surveillance to prevent terror attacks. He was never the President and had more US citizens died in domestic terror atttacks, no blood would have been on his hands.

Some people on the left and the right have Fourth Amendment (Privacy) concerns about wiretapping a US citizen without a court order. Bob Barr, former Congressman from Georgia and staunch gun rights advocate had lent his name to the Gore speech. One assumes Barr will also be heard from in the coming days. Gore attempts to make the case that this is not a partisan attack:

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

I wonder how many conservatives will be willing to lend their names and efforts to this attack, knowing that the ultimate goal is to impeach President Bush as a reward for his post 9/11 service to the country and drive him out of office.

It's ironic on a holiday formerly recognised as President's Day that a ranting Al Gore maliciously attacks President George Bush with little more than innuendo.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

Obviously, he suffers from the same mysterious illness that infects leftists with a bitterness detached from reality and separated in time from September 11, 2001.

...contending that Bush failed to convince Congress to support a domestic spying program, so he "secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother."

"What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently," the Democrat maintained.

He said the spying program must be considered along with other administration actions as a constitutional power grab by the president. Gore cited imprisoning American citizens without charges in terrorism cases, mistreatment of prisoners including torture and seizure of individuals in foreign countries and delivering them to autocratic regimes "infamous for the cruelty of their techniques."

The latest leftist smear against the President is this "power grab" charge. It surfaced in the Alito Hearings when Democrat Senators questioned Sam Alito on his views regarding the "Unitary Executive." Leftists have alleged that Alito's nomination is an attempt by Bush to "pack the court" to insure himself a court majority against future legal proceedings. Now, I wonder if the Democrat's 'Unitary Executive' angle in the Alito Hearings was actually to promote the larger power grab charge in advance of the Gore speech.

So, on Martin Luther King Day, Al Gore loosely ties his speech to the occasion and accuses the President of a ruthless power grab, being a murderous torturer and bringing a Constitutional crisis to our social fabric. Al Gore is a very complex man, he presents himself as an intellectual but lately his public speaking has taken more of an angry, populist style. It's a style reminiscient of Huey Long or Fidel Castro. Thank God, this man is not the President of the United States.

It could well be that in a post 9/11 world, our national laws were inadequate and the President's Administration had to push the envelope on domestic spying. In spite of what a deranged Al Gore alleges, we do not know that the President willfully and callously spied on "huge" numbers of Americans. We know that there has been a huge debate on what constitutes torture and when it is appropriate to use it. We know that issues such as Abu Graib have been used by the left in the unrelenting assault on the Bush Administration and the Military.

The President maintains that he has done nothing wrong and that his administration was acting only in the interest of protecting the American people. The question is, if there are constitutional problems with our laws regarding electronic surveillance, why has Congress not acted to correct them? Why have we come to another Al Gore rant from a national stage and was George Soros standing in the wings?


Drudge has a complete transcript of the speech.

Update: Byron York at National Review Online attended the speech and has some interesting observations of Gore's contradictions such as:

"The threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the executive branch with swiftness and agility," Gore told the audience at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall. "Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the president to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not."

Ben Johnson writing at Frontpagemag.com did an excellent analysis and dismantled Gore as thoroughly as anyone could.