Gingrich-Gore '08: For a Snootier America
David Weigel | June 13, 2007, 10:44am
There are two takeways in
this Ryan Lizza interview with Al Gore.
1) What an insufferable, elitist scold he is. (Gore, not Lizza.)
2) How much he sounds like Newt Gingrich.
To wit:
"I don't want to be critical of the candidates. That's not my intention," he says. "I don't think the modern campaign process facilitates a genuine exchange of ideas. It's multiple overlapping games of gotcha, and who can read the polls and the focus groups most skillfully and discern some new manipulative option that can be quickly parlayed into a couple of percentage points in the next poll and parlay that into greater fund-raising totals by the end of the next reporting period." It's almost as if he feels sorry for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the others, as if they are hamsters locked in the cage of a broken political process, a cage that Gore is all too familiar with and does not seem to miss.
Compare that with what
Newt Gingrich said in North Carolina.
"We have shrunk our political process to this pathetic dance in which people spend an entire year raising money in order to offer nonanswers, so they can memorize what their consultants and focus groups said would work," Gingrich said.
In a speech to the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank, the prospective Republican candidate said he will not consider running until he has created a wave of reform.
No wonder Gingrich wants to modernize our health care system: He needs immediate medical attention on that grotesquely swollen head. "Our politics are too small and petty" is the most trite, tired possible critique you can make of a presidential election—the doctrine of whiners who know they can't win. Did Gingrich think this way about politics when he was building a GOP platform based on what polled above 70 pecent? When he was sheparding the impeachment of Clinton I because he thought it would win the party House seats? Did Gore think politics was too small when he was egging on Ed Koch in the battle to set New York Jews against New York black voters? When he promised Al Sharpton that the "first civil rights act of the 21st century would be a law outlawing racial profiling"?
Enough already with pretending Gore and Gingrich are prophets or above politics. They wouldn't know straight talk if John McCain's bus ran them over.
Getcher Gingrich-bashing
here and your Gore-loathing
here. Ashish George | June 13, 2007, 11:54am | #
"Enough already with pretending Gore and Gingrich are prophets or above politics."
I haven't really followed Gingrich's public life too closely, and I agree with Weigel that Gore probably isn't above politics so much as just bad at it, but face it: In the Bush era, Gore has been more "prophetic" about some of the major issues of the day than many Reason staffers.
Nick Gillespie had mixed feelings about the war and only came to his senses fairly late in the game. Ronald Bailey was spectacularly wrong about global warming for years and supported the Iraq War at first. Michael Young probably still thinks the war was worth it. And Cathy Young, well, I'll let her idiocy speak for itself:
"It is certainly true that the war in Iraq has been mishandled; it may have been misguided in the first place. It is, regrettably, true that the cavalier attitude toward prisoner abuse has undermined our moral authority in the war on terror. But acknowledging our mistakes and misdeeds should not undercut moral clarity when it comes to terrorism. The jihadists are driven primarily by hatred of Western civilization and its freedom; their primary targets are innocent civilians; and they cannot be defeated except by force."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/32032.html
And in words that should be etched forever in the libertarian Hall of Shame:
"It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks."
http://www.reason.com/news/show/31970.html
So by all means, Weigel, mock Gore for being pompous. He probably deserves it. But the truth is the country would probably have been better off with his ideas over the past six years than with those of some of your colleagues.
Better to be harmlessly arrogant than dangerously wrong.
Ashish George | June 13, 2007, 1:47pm | #
"Why do they want the Democratic state to withdraw? Because the last thing they want is for a democracy or freedom to occur where they are."
Please provide academic citations for this bold(by which I mean absurd) claim. If you cannot, you are just speaking out of ignorance and should just head back to Townhall.com where you will be praised as a sage.
It you had bothered to read my link, you would have come across this...
"RP: Osama bin Laden’s speeches and sermons run 40 and 50 pages long. They begin by calling tremendous attention to the presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula.
In 1996, he went on to say that there was a grand plan by the United States—that the Americans were going to use combat forces to conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces, give a piece of it to Israel so that Israel could enlarge its country, and then do the same thing to Saudi Arabia. As you can see, we are fulfilling his prediction, which is of tremendous help in his mobilization appeals.
TAC: The fact that we had troops stationed on the Arabian Peninsula was not a very live issue in American debate at all. How many Saudis and other people in the Gulf were conscious of it?
RP: We would like to think that if we could keep a low profile with our troops that it would be okay to station them in foreign countries. The truth is, we did keep a fairly low profile. We did try to keep them away from Saudi society in general, but the key issue with American troops is their actual combat power. Tens of thousands of American combat troops, married with air power, is a tremendously powerful tool.
Now, of course, today we have 150,000 troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and we are more in control of the Arabian Peninsula than ever before.
TAC: If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?
RP: The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.
If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.
Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.
I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.
Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled."
