Gore (again!)

I admit it; not only did I strongly support Al Gore, I really enjoyed his book Earth in the Balance which he wrote in the early 1990’s. It was unbelievably well-written and researched. He truly is a Renaissance Man (and indeed, that might have been his fatal flaw).

He has delivered some factual denunications of Bush’s policies, which quite frankly are dismissed as absolutely irrelevant. Which of course is true. And yet I enjoy reading the eloquence of his denunciations, and it has to make one wonder why Gore couldn’t use rhetoric to his advantage in 2000.

Look at this quote from his latest Moveon speech:

Iraq is not the only policy where the President has made bold assertions about the need for a dramatic change in American policy, a change that he has said is mandated by controversial assertions that differ radically from accepted views of reality in that particular policy area. And as with Iraq, there are other cases where subsequently available information shows that the President actually had analyses that he was given from reputable sources that were directly contrary what he told the American people. And, in virtually every case, the President, it is now evident, rejected the information that later turned out to be accurate and instead chose to rely upon, and to forcefully present to the American people, information that subsequently turned out to be false. And in every case, the flawed analysis was provided to him from sources that had a direct interest, financial or otherwise, in the radically new policy that the President adopted. And, in those cases where the policy has been implemented, the consequences have been to detriment of the American people, often catastrophically so. In other cases, the consequences still lie in the future but are nonetheless perfectly predictably for anyone who is reasonable. In yet other cases the policies have not yet been implemented but have been clearly designated by the President as priorities for the second term he has asked for from the American people. At the top of this list is the privatization of social security.

Gore has suggested a reason why Cheney’s Energy Task force was kept a secret: it was contemplating taking over oil fields from the very beginning. This is pretty shocking stuff!

The evidence shows clearly that there was no such imminent threat and that Bush knew that at the time he stated otherwise. He claimed that gaining dominance of Iraqi oil fields for American producers was never part of his calculation. But we now know, from a document uncovered by the New Yorker and dated just two weeks to the day after Bush?s inauguration, that his National Security Counsel was ordered to ?meld? its review of ?operational policies toward rogue states? with the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force?s ?actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields. We also know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against that Cheney Task Force by the odd combination of Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club that one of the documents receiving scrutiny by the task force during the same time period was a detailed map of Iraq showing none of the cities or places where people live but showing in great detail the location of every single oil deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarking blocks for promising exploration ? a map which, in the words of a Canadian newspaper, resembled a butcher?s drawing of a steer, with the prime cuts delineated. We know that Cheney himself, while heading Halliburton, did more business with Iraq than any other nation, even though it was under U.N. sanctions, and that Cheney stated in a public speech to the London Petroleum Institute in 1999 that, over the coming decade, the world will need 50 million extra barrels of oil per day. ?Where is it going to come from?? Answering his own question, he said, ?The middle east, with two thirds of the world?s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.?