Draft Al Gore 2008

This ad appeared in the New York Times… hopefully he’s listening…

Al Gore, “The Assault On Reason”

Some Summer reading to look forward to, from Al Gore — The Assult on Reason:

American democracy is now in danger-not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

TIME has more.

A Message from Andrew Sullivan

From Andrew Sullivan to his former colleagues in the American right:

Both National Review and the Weekly Standard aim for the Baker-Hamilton Group this week. But when you examine what the Kristol-Kagan team sees as the alternative to a gradual retreat from the South and Anbar into Kurdistan, you can’t help wondering how serious they really are.

[...]

The attempt to belittle the efforts of Baker-Hamilton is therefore pure positioning. In Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, there is tragically no alternative to some sort of retrenchment and retreat right now. I agree we need an effort to expand the military by several divisions. That was Al Gore’s position in 2000, by the way, the candidate the Weekly Standard hounded as insane and weak. It was Kerry’s position in 2004, another candidate the WS smeared as Jane Fonda in drag. Maybe a period of retrenchment and rebuilding of US forces could mean a new offensive in a year or so. But the idea that it can be accomplished swiftly enough now to make a difference in a "country" that has already disintegrated into Hobbesian hell is pure fantasy and Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan must know it.

[...]

It’s over, guys. Your beloved Bush administration botched this so badly it’s irrecoverable. You enabled them. You never fully took them on when it would have counted - and you trashed those of us who did. You knew this before the 2004 election and still cynically played the anti-Kerry card for all it was worth, telling yourselves you could sway Rummy after the election. Well, you couldn’t and you didn’t. Your policy was sabotaged by a defense secretary who never believed in it and by a president too weak and out-of-it to rein him in. Get over yourselves and recognize that this dream has died. And we have to fight the nightmare we now face rather than pretend your dream is still even on life-support. That’s the patriotic responsibility at this point. And no, I’m not impugning your patriotism. I’m asking you to place it before your shattered dreams.

A. Nag on Gore

I haven’t posted in a while, so lemme ease my way back in slowly and simply lead you to this short post over at MyDD.com:

With all of the focus on Al Gore these days as a result of his successful new movie, it was only a matter of time before New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney jumped on the bandwagon and penned a piece on the former two-term Vice President. But judging by the article, which runs in the Sunday Times, Gore was well prepared to combat Nagourney’s often excessive focus on the political horserace over substance.

Jonathan Singer, the blogger behind this post, does a great job of zeroing in on the issues that many of us on the political sidelines find irritating about professional political observers; that is, their cynicism and obsessive focus on the horserace, rather than on the substance of the issues. And, as quoted in the MyDD.com post, Al Gore agrees, as he responds to A. Nag:

"We need to shift gears in corporate America and in our politics and in our economy and in our culture," he said. "Most of all, political scribes have to take off their cynical lenses through which they view every moral challenge as political spin."

Go read the MyDD.com post, and don’t forget to read A. Nag’s article over at NYTimes.com.