Gore's call to arms

[erik_kosberg]

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/6353.html

I expected today's speech from Al Gore to be good, but I didn't appreciate what a sweeping and powerful condemnation it would be of the White House, Congress' perfidy, and what Gore described as a wholesale rejection of constitutional principles. It was, in a word, devastating.

So, what do you think of the speech?

BTW, an AP story about the speech.

[poseidon]

A call to arms? Ha! Your title is misleading, Erik. Here I thought Al Gore (v4.x) was calling for armed civil revolution. I was all ready to comment on how wonderful it was for a liberal Democrat to realize what his Second Amendment rights were all about. Instead, I'm disappointed, and have to give my thoughts on the speech itself.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

Grave danger? How so? Has the president suspended the constitution? No. Has he started rounding up and jailing dissenters? I think not. I'll agree that the White House "spying" on Americans is questionable, and from what I can tell, likely illegal. Curtis and some others who are more knowledgable about the law may disagree.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States."

Define "large numbers." Were 1,000 Americans spied on? 10,000? 100,000? 1 million?

Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

Ah, that clears things up. Large numbers = massive.

Gore then goes on for several paragraphs stating that it is important to follow the rule of law. On this, we agree. If the president violated the law, he should be indicated and tried (impeachment and possible removal). If the president didn't violate the law, then the point is moot. Articles of impeachment have been a left-wing fantasy since the day GWB took office. I find it difficult to believe that the Dems just "don't have the guts" to present them. They'd do it in a heartbeat. If the GOP won't allow it to even come to light, then Dems should be screaming to the press about it and bring it to the peoples' attention.

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

Right, and when he goes on to the next paragraph, we agree:

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

So, what's different in this case? Gore sees it as the probable end of the Republic. I disagree. Bush will be out of office in, at the most, just under three years (and, if Articles of Impeachment are levied against him and he is removed from office, sooner).

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President's judicial nominees.

Why not talk about the story behind the truth, like the Democrats not wanting to hold up a nomination because the candidate is unqualified, but their wanting to hold up a nomination because they disagree with the nominee's political leanings? The system works -- Harriett Miers was given the "thumbs down" by the American people, conservative and liberal (and, at times, more conservatives than liberals), because we doubted her qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice. We didn't know and didn't care about her political leanings -- we cared about whether she was qualified to sit on the bench. It is the Dems who overstep their bounds when they do not allow a vote on a candidate because the candidate isn't liberal enough for their liking. The GOP did it, too, with some of Clinton's nominees. That was equally reprehensible. Neither party should be able to hide behind this bullshit -- and it is just that, 100% Grade-A, government-certified pure bullshit.

But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

If they're too wimpy to claim the powers that the constitution declares for them, whose fault is that? The president's? Congress's? The American people? It certainly isn't the president's fault -- a president will take powers that Congress allows him to take, especially if they don't fight back. Congress should be raising a stink. If the majority party won't do it, then the minority party should.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

Don't even get me started on this. This is a man who managed to get campaign donations from Buddhist nuns who had taken vows of poverty.

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

For the most part, true. But, it also depends on what you watch. There's a lot of schlock on TV, but there's a lot of good channels that do a whole helluva lot of educating. Discovery, TLC, the 24/7 news channels, C-SPAN networks, the History Channel, etc. all provide for a great supplement to the educational process.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing -- especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive-and not just superficial-hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Agreed. Find what happened and do something about it if something illegal occurred. What I don't want to see is a repeat of Election Eve 1992 -- with the special prosecutor stating that he couldn't find any wrongdoing by the president, but he just knew that something illegal had occurred.

So, where's this "call to arms?"

[drmomentum[$]]

I enjoyed Jeff's analysis thoroughly and think he should do this more often. In fact, isn't the SotU coming up?

I disagree that the Discovery Channel, TLC and the History Channel are much good for education. They are mildly less toxic infotainment.

In some cases, the Discovery Channel and its ilk has produced such travesties as that "Dragons" show which had some people actually believing that scientists had discovered dragons.

It ain't no PBS.

As for the rest, I disagree with your conclusions, but found your comments interesting and thoughtful.

What is significant about this speech is how it ties a bunch of concerns together in an articulate way. It's a speech, not an academic paper. The idea is to reach people. Ignoring the gestalt is going to miss the point. Does this speech have impact that will be felt? Time will tell that, I guess. He's touching on things that even you agree with, and that gives the speech weight.

-JP

[poseidon]

drmomentum said

I disagree that the Discovery Channel, TLC and the History Channel are much good for education. They are mildly less toxic infotainment.

Infotainment, yes. Education, certainly. I'm exposed to things that I've never before thought about on those stations. Sometimes, there's something that captivates the attention.

Education is more than what you read in books and newspapers. If I don't know much about, say, the Civil War, and the History Channel has a documentary on it, and I watch it and learn something, how is that not educational? I happen to like watching "Mythbusters" every so often. I'd certainly consider that show to be educational.

In some cases, the Discovery Channel and its ilk has produced such travesties as that "Dragons" show which had some people actually believing that scientists had discovered dragons.

Agreed. Sometimes they, too, put schlock on their station.

It ain't no PBS.

Right, they don't do political commentary.

[CurtisEdmonds]

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Um... why should FBI domestic surveillance of Dr. King lead to the passage of an act regarding wiretapping relative to foreign intelligence?

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

Slippery slope argument -- doesn't seem to be supported by any facts. The fact that GWB kept the wiretaps secret would seem to negate the argument that he was using it as a means to arrogate more power.

In the words of George Orwell: "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Gore, of course, invented the Internet and won the 2000 election...

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people.

"Incompetence"? The problem, IIRC, was that revealing this information to the FBI would breach the "wall" put up between military and civilian information set into place by the Clinton Justice Department. What walls would Gore put up?

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements.

Yeah, if only someone would come along and develop a way for people to communicate across broad distances, using computers or something, like on an "information superhighway".

[realtraveller]

When this man was Vice-President a warrantless physical search approved by his administration was conducted on the home of Aldrich Ames in Virginia. Blatant hypocrisy.

[erik_kosberg]

realtraveller said

When this man was Vice-President a warrantless physical search approved by his administration was conducted on the home of Aldrich Ames in Virginia. Blatant hypocrisy.

Bullshit detector available here.

BTW, “Monastics at the Hsi Lai temple are not required to take a vow of poverty...”

[realtraveller]

The Clinton-Gore administration believed that under the Constitution the executive branch had inherent authority to conduct a warrantless search on U. S. soil for national security reasons. Ames was a spy. They also took the position that the enactment of FISA didn't have any effect on that authority.

Congress cannot pass a law that takes away the executive branches Constitutional authority anymore than the President can take away any of the powers of Congress.

It would take a Constitutional Amendment to re-arrange either branch of governments Constitutionally granted powers.

[realtraveller]

erik_kosberg said

BTW, “Monastics at the Hsi Lai temple are not required to take a vow of poverty...”

BTW, Maria Hsia, the woman involved in the whole Buddhist temple mess was convicted of 5 felony counts related to the illegal donations in 2000.

[poseidon]

realtraveller said

BTW, Maria Hsia, the woman involved in the whole Buddhist temple mess was convicted of 5 felony counts related to the illegal donations in 2000.

FWIW.

[erik_kosberg]

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007455.php

When I think about the Gore now, in the period since he left elected office, what stands out most about him is the way that he has become a standing rebuke to the shame and moral indolence of today's custodians of received opinion. You can see it in the sneering and bemused responses his speeches receive from the usual cast of characters.

Damn straight.

[poseidon]

BFD, Erik. The same thing can be said of Newt Gingrich. He's saying some pretty damning stuff, at the expense of fellow Republicans. What does he get in return from the "usual cast of characters?" Sneering and bemused responses.

[erik_kosberg]

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/6362.html

...it suggests the White House simply has nothing else to offer in the way of a response to Gore. Given 24 hours notice, the best McClellan and his colleagues could come up with is a demonstrably false claim. Where's the creativity? The skillful spin? I'm disappointed with the mendacity, but also with the laziness. McClellan might as well mock Gore for inventing the internet. It's about as accurate and nearly as clever.

[drmomentum[$]]

Gore is a robot!

...

Always late to the party.

[poseidon]

drmomentum said

Gore is a robot!

Well, android perhaps. Nah, he just talks like one.

[erik_kosberg]

Gore responds to the White House's blather:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=59370

[CurtisEdmonds]

erik_kosberg said

When I think about the Gore now, in the period since he left elected office, what stands out most about him is the way that he has become a standing rebuke to the shame and moral indolence of today's custodians of received opinion. You can see it in the sneering and bemused responses his speeches receive from the usual cast of characters.

Hey! I'm an equal-opportunity sneerer. There's just more material on his side of the aisle, that's all.

[robert lashley]

erik_kosberg said

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/6353.htmlSo, what do you think of the speech?

BTW, an AP story about the speech.

Where have you gone, Bayard Rustin and Scoop Jackson, our nation turns it's lonely eyes to you.

[rmthunter]

realtraveller said

When this man was Vice-President a warrantless physical search approved by his administration was conducted on the home of Aldrich Ames in Virginia. Blatant hypocrisy.

When this man was Vice President, and when the Ames search was conducted, a warrantless physical search was legal.

But at the time of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

A little fact-checking wouldn't hurt.