No President Gore

Former Vice President Al Gore said today that he has no plans on running for President again.

In the speech, he also offered some remarks about the Bush administration and Bush's policies.

"We would not have invaded a country that didn't attack us," in reference to Iraq.
There's a certain amount of logic to this statement. In elementary school, we were always taught that you are allowed to hit back, but you're never allowed to hit first. We would never justify shooting a lion at the zoo, even if the gate's open, on the premise that it might bite us.

"We would not have taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families."
I assume he's talking about President Bush's tax cuts. Well, according to what we've learned in Federal Income Tax class, the working families and the poor aren't the ones paying the taxes. In 2002, over 50% of all Income Tax revenue came from the top 10% highest earning incomes. and 96% came from those in the top 50% incomes. Any tax cuts are by definition going to affect the wealthy over the non-wealthy. This sounds like pandering to the base to me.

"We would not be trying to control and intimidate the news media."
I don't think I get this one. The Office of the President usually wants to control the media to a certain extent. I think he's off line here.

"We would not be routinely torturing people."
We wouldn't? Well, if we weren't at war, then we wouldn't have prisoners to torture, so perhaps he's stating a truth here. However, let's work on a presumption. Let's presume that most, if not all countries torture prisoners. Let's presume that countries will do whatever they can behind closed doors if they know they can get away with it. Do we really and truly believe that our country HONESTLY has acted better than what we claim other nations have in terms of torture? I think instead of what he said, he actually meant something more along the lines of "We would do a better job of not getting caught torturing people." And then try to ensure that he's "out of the loop" on what's going on, as so many military leaders do. If you state that you won't tolerate something on the record, and then contradict that statement through your actions, tacitly allowing the condemned acts either by absence or by selective ignorance, then you've commited the crime. It's a shame that you can't get caught for it because of documentation. Sorry, soapbox moment.

Anyway, I don't know that the country would really be any better off than had Gore won the election. I believe Bush was the lesser of the evils in the 2004 election, but that was a different election at a different time.