Weird Al Gore Strikes Back

Sometime since the 2000 election, Weird Al Gorevich was abducted and impregnated by aliens.

How else to explain his latest performance? Not content with the Alpha Male image, the normally glassy-eyed Gore shed the vacant Valley of the Dolls demeanor that has so endeared him to the American public and reinvented himself a la James Dean/Che Guevara, calling for a bloodless coup at the highest levels of the adminstration. He must have a new, hip public relations manager.

John Podhoretz puts it bluntly: not to put too fine a point on it, "Al Gore is insane."

Gore's speech is the single craziest political performance of my lifetime, and I use the word "craziest" advisedly. The speech, at 6,600 words, was twice as long as Bush's address to the nation on Monday night. The indiscipline shown by the sheer endlessness of Gore's address is a reflection of the psychic morass in which he has become mired.

A man who was very, very nearly president of the United States has been reduced to sounding like one of those people in Times Square with a megaphone screaming about God's justice. It is almost impossible to believe that this man was once vice president of the United States.

As a stalwart supporter of the war, I would naturally be inclined to find Gore's line of attack discomfiting and upsetting, even enraging. Instead, I feel an intense sadness and a great sense of relief. The sadness comes from the sight of a man losing his sanity in public. The relief comes from the fact that he is not, and never will be, the president of the United States.

It is sad to see a man of Gore's former stature descend into madness. A few observations on his speech:

1. The Geneva Convention applies to uniformed combatants of nation-states, not terrorists. Gore knows better. This doesn't make what happened at Abu Ghraib right, but those offenses are being investigated and punished. As Gore also knows - and deliberately overlooks in his speech.

2. Gore mentions Kay's "concluding" his investigation into WMDs. That investigation is ongoing. Kay's statement was premature, as the investigation is not finished. Gore knows this. It is The Unit's considered opinion that Hans Blix and David Kay are sleeping together. Look at the convergence in their public statements over time: his theory explains a lot.

3. As to the "no links between Iraq and al-Qaeda", well Al, that's because the Clinton adminstration covered all evidence of them up. See my prior posts on this subject.

4. "Kerry should not tie his own hands by offering overly specific, detailed proposals concerning a situation that is rapidly changing and unfortunately, rapidly deteriorating, but should rather preserve his, and our country's, options, to retrieve our national honor as soon as this long national nightmare is over. " Let me understand this: the administration is required to maintain a detailed plan to address a rapidly-changing situation, but Kerry is not? Well, no worries. No one, least of all Kerry, has a clue as to what JFK will do once he is in office.

5. I'm struggling to understand your "pain" at the suggestion that Tenet should resign. According to Richard Clarke, your boss Bill Clinton refused to attend CIA briefs on Clarke's advice during his tenure as President. So he ignored the CIA's advice anyway. Clearly it was the Clinton adminstration's position that the CIA was unreliable as a source of information.

6. I find it interesting that you're still harping on the SC decision to halt the recount. An independent audit conducted by several newspapers found that, had the recount been allowed to continue, you would have lost the election. Your point, Big Guy?

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway has a related post on Gore's speech you may want to check out.

John Hawkins wonders why the left can't reserve their venom for the terrorists...

- Cassandra