The other day I criticized the Democrats for their ineffectiveness and bloviating during the Alito confirmation hearings. I said that the hardliner conservatives are correct in stereotyping liberal Democrats as weak. They prove themselves right every day when the Democrats roll over for them. And the few that actually stand up they can safely isolate and ridicule because they know the Dems will run away from them as soon as things get too hot.
Now we have the case of Al Gore. I heard parts of his speech last night about the warrantless wiretaps on C-Span, and it's remarkable really how far he's come in the last year or so. I'm sure after the election in 2000, he thought he was doing the noble, magnanimous thing in conceding to Bush, but he should have fought harder to get things straight in Florida, and his not fighting reinforced my misgivings about him at the time. But he's not the same guy now, and I like him a lot better for reasons that, like Dean, now make him unelectable.
We forget, too, that Gore was "swiftboated" before he or most of the rest of us knew the depths to which the GOP was willing to go to negatively brand their opponents. Jack Murtha is now getting his dose of it. Robert Parry points out that Gore actually was one of the first to challenge the idea of the "Bush Doctrine" and reminds us how he was savaged in 2002 after his speech about it:
This domestic “politics of preemption” has a covert side, including surveillance of U.S. anti-war groups, but the largest part is out in the open, using right-wing media and sympathetic columnists to denounce, ridicule and drown out critics.
A test run of this propaganda operation occurred in early fall 2002 when Bush was starting a war fever among the American people and former Vice President Al Gore delivered a tough-minded critique of the “Bush Doctrine.”
“I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century,” Gore said in a speech on Sept. 23, 2002.
“To put first things first, I believe that we ought to be focusing our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on Sept. 11,” Gore said. “Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism.”
Now – with more than 2,200 Americans soldiers dead in Iraq along with tens of thousands of Iraqis – Gore’s comments sound prescient. In early fall 2002, however, Gore’s speech received scant media attention, except for denunciations from pro-Bush commentators.
Some epithets were hurled by Bush partisans. Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke called Gore a “political hack.” [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2002]
Other slurs came from conservative opinion-makers on editorial pages, on talk radio and on television chat shows.
“Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered,” wrote Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. “It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts – bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]
“A pudding with no theme but much poison,” declared another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. “It was a disgrace – a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002]
At Salon.com, Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece about Gore’s speech “The Opportunist” and characterized Gore as “bitter.”
While other writers followed Sullivan in depicting Gore’s motivation as “opportunism,” columnist William Bennett took an opposite tack, saying Gore had committed political “self-immolation” and had banished himself “from the mainstream of public opinion.”
“Now we have reason to be grateful once again that Al Gore is not the man in the White House, and never will be,” Bennett wrote. [WSJ, Sept. 26, 2002] [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Politics of Preemption.”]
More than three years later, Bush’s “politics of preemption” have advanced along with the complementary theory of the “unitary executive,” a notion espoused by right-wing jurists who argue that the President has virtually unlimited powers in a time of war.
But don't dare to point this out, because you'll be swiftboated, and your typical career pol would rather would rather not have to deal with that. Be like Joe Lieberman instead; he's a nice housetrained Democrat. Behave yourself, like Joe, and nobody gets hurt.
Dean, Feingold, Murtha, and Gore have been the only prominent Democrats (I suppose the paleo-liberal Kennedy should be thrown in there, but I don't like to think about him) who have tried to provide some leadership in reisting the GOP machine. Problem is nobody's following.