Al Gore, Idiot

There he goes again:

In his speech, Gore, who during the impeachment battle of 1998 and 1999 was perhaps President Clinton's most impassioned defender, expressed a profound reverence for the rule of law. He referred to it nine times, saying, among other things:

"It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored."

"Once violated, the rule of law is in danger."

"[We must] safeguard our Constitution against...the president's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law."

The audience loved it. (It was not, by the way, a full house; organizers estimated attendance between 2,800 and 3,200, a turnout which left lots of empty seats in the upper tiers of Constitution Hall.) They also loved Gore's five recommendations for dealing with the "crisis." First on the list was the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the NSA surveillance. Citing the Patrick Fitzgerald CIA leak investigation, Gore said we have learned how "an independent investigation by a special counsel can rebuild confidence in our system of justice." That got a good round of applause.

But wait. Isn't Fitzgerald looking for whoever might have leaked classified information in the Valerie Wilson affair? Gore certainly doesn't want that to happen in the NSA matter. So his second recommendation was that "new whistleblower protections should immediately be established" to guard those who leak highly classified information like the existence of the NSA program. More applause. Someone leaked the nation's secrets in the NSA case, but nobody at Constitution Hall wanted to know who it is.

Still, amid all the accusing and prescribing, Gore uttered those few words about the president's "inherent power" to take "unilateral action" during an emergency. No matter what else he said, Gore flatly declared that the president has the inherent authority to do what he believes is necessary to defend the country. While the crowd sat on its hands — what's he saying? — the statement shouldn't have been a surprise. Gore is, after all, the former vice president of an administration that claimed the inherent authority to order national-security break-ins without a warrant. Even when the administration supported placing such break-ins under FISA restrictions, it still claimed the inherent authority to do them unilaterally, if the president thought necessary. (See here and here .) So it's worth noting that Gore, like other Clinton-administration officials, did not say that President Bush does not have the authority to order warrantless surveillance targeted at al Qaeda communications. Rather, his complaint seems to be that Bush has done too much of that sort of thing for too long, which Gore claims has produced "a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government."

Other parts of Gore's speech just didn't make sense. For example, he devoted a good deal of time to discussing the history of curtailments of civil liberties during the course of American history. First there were the Alien and Sedition Acts, and then Lincoln and suspension of habeas corpus, and then Wilson and the Palmer Raids. And then came the second World War. "The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive," Gore said. "And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. [Martin Luther] King and thousands of others." After each episode, Gore explained, when "the conflict and turmoil subsided," Americans reflected on what had been done and "absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret."

Yet later in the speech, Gore credited earlier generations with resisting the temptation to curtail rights, even in the face of grave dangers like World War II and the Cold War. "Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice?" Gore asked. "Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march — when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?" Not at all, Gore said. "It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same."

Well, which was it? Did members of earlier generations "faithfully protect" our liberties, or did they set up COINTELPRO and intern Japanese Americans? Gore said both things, just a few minutes apart. It was, in a way, characteristic of his entire speech. Unilateral presidential action is illegal and it's legal. Leaks are bad and they're good. Previous generations curtailed our rights and they didn't.

This guy's the best refutation of Darwin's theory I can think of: there's no way somebody this stupid would live to reproduce if the materialists were right. That we were spared this moron running our nation is a sure sign God smiles upon us to this day.