Dartblog

When I wrote yesterday that Al Gore had announced that he would not seek the presidency in 2008, I left it at that. But Gore himself, I now learn, did not. Al Gore was speaking in Stockholm, Sweden yesterday at an economic forum. During questions there, he removed himself from potential candidacy. But he then continued to opine vociferously on domestic issues in a way that embarrassed himself and his country.

There is an old saying about domestic political divisions. It is more than a saying, in fact. It is nothing short of a pillar, one which has guided every president, former president, and diplomat through hundreds of years. At the water’s edge, Republicans and Democrats merge into one. American politicians, whether in power or not, vest in their countenance all America when overseas. And so they represent her interests, her leadership, and her people with strength and unity of voice.

Al Gore betrayed that principle in Sweden. Asked in that foreign land what might be different about the United States had he won the election in 2004, he replied:

We would not have invaded a country that didn’t attack us. We would not have taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families. We would not be trying to control and intimidate the news media. We would not be routinely torturing people. We would be a different country.

The inaccuracy of his projections are hardly worth recounting once again. Iraq has always been a threat to itself, its neighbors and, eventually, to the United States. Just as you go to war with the army you have, so do you declare war with the intelligence you have. Al Gore’s party signed on to war. And today, from the theater of that very war they supported and now decry, we have proof that al Qaeda has a close working relationship with what it names the center of its jihad for an Islamic fundamentalist world- Iraq. A battleground from which we now know al Qaeda is worried that its efforts there are failing, and that needs it fast cash to continue operating.

But above all, that missive warned to continue succeeding in the propaganda war. Al Gore is a central part of that war, and he’s on the wrong side. When an ex-vice president goes overseas and disrespects the sitting president’s policies, jabs his own country’s war effort, revisits a lost election and thereby fosters the impression that the sitting president is illegitimate, that ex-vice president is a danger.

When did Al Gore founder so low?