Since Russ Feingold will not be running for President, I will now be endorsing Al Gore for President for 2008. I am asking anybody who supported Russ Feingold for President to support Al Gore for President so we can restore the rule of law to the White House and restore the system of checks and balances to our Constitutional system.
Like many of us, I was not enthused by Al Gore in 2000. I voted for Nader as a way of pushing the Democratic party to the left and thus creating a Green Revolution. I thought that Bush would not be that bad of a President anyway, as he would be bipartisan and supposedly be above the fray. In the meantime, we could move the party and the country to the left and everybody would be happy.
I was naive then. I did not recognize that the purpose of voting and electing candidates was to defend against tyranny instead of finding the Perfect Candidate. The information was out there to expose Bush as the tyrant he was. But none of us ever used it or simply dismissed it as simply politics.
Prosperity is great, but prosperity can also make people fall asleep or turn into naive idealists. The danger of prosperity is that it lulls people to sleep. We forget that there are always evil men out there who lust for power and who would do anything to take our freedoms away and who would stop at nothing to grab as much power for themselves as possible.
It was Al Gore who was among the first people to warn of the dangers of the tyranny of the Bush administration and who warned against going into Iraq. He was one of the first people to foresee that our very existence depends on how well we tackle the environment. He has been talking about the dangers of ignoring our environmental problems and climate change for the last 15+ years and has awakened many other people to the need to protect our environment for a long time to come. As the latest example, Gordon Brown is now having Al Gore advise the British Government on climate change.
The Bush administration has systematically eroded the system of checks and balances in our Constitution. Ours is a restoration movement, to restore the system of checks and balances and to restore our leadership role in international affairs. In 2000, that system was broken thanks to the whims of five men who wilfully ignored the wishes of Florida voters and handed the Presidency to Bush.
Gore has expressed reluctance to run for President in 2008. But he has never made a public statement ruling it out. In fact, he could be posing as a reluctant hero, willing to jump in only if enough people persuade him to run. Gore has made plenty of hints as to what must happen. He has been a frequent critic of TV’s influence on people in general. The implication here is clear – for Al Gore to run, he must be able to get his message out despite any hostile media that comes his was. Therefore, we must take on the responsibility of getting Al Gore’s message out to our friends and neighbors.
This means we must all be watchdogs for Gore. This means that we should Google regularly and watch the media, looking for what people are saying about him. Anything – good, indifferent, or hostile – should be reviewed and addressed. Inaccurate information – no matter how insignificant – must be debunked. We must provide rapid response to any Republican smears on Gore so that people will know the truth.
This is not the most convenient thing for me to do. I would have rather been doing work this morning. But if we are to maintain our political system and restore the rule of law and order, we must take time out of our busy schedules, talk politics with our friends and neighbors, and take apart anything we see about Al Gore that is not fair or accurate.
The Second Amendment declares that the people have the right to bear arms. But it does more than just that. It specifically gives the people the responsibility to protect our system against any forms of tyranny. It is not the job of the Democratic Party or Howard Dean or Bev Harris or the preacher or the media to protect our political system. It is our responsibility to protect our political system from the kind of tyranny that the right-wingers are trying to impose. The Right to Bear Arms is a symbol of that – if the government becomes a tyranny, then the people were to take up arms again and overthrow the government.
Times have changed since then, but we still have the responsibility to protect our system against dictators. The 2006 elections have shown that despite the assaults on our freedoms by the Bush administration, the system of checks and balances is still working. We can still work to elect people who will protect and advance our rights as opposed to attacking them.
Al Gore has a big advantage in 2008 over 2000 – since that election, the right-wing noise machine is as strong as ever. But there is a difference – the rise of the blogosphere and the proof that we can influence elections for the better means that we will be there to fight back this time. We no longer need to depend on the media to spoonfeed us what they want us to hear. We no longer need to depend on the candidate to provide rapid response. We can take any news story and get it debunked in an hour if we need to. We can serve as an early warning system for any potential bad news so we can neutralize it as quickly as possible. We can break news and be on top of things days and even weeks before the media starts to pay attention.
Gore has another advantage – The Republicans are a lot more divided this time than they were last time. Jim Glichrist is all but certain to run for President on the Constitution Party, with the help of Jerome Corsi, the right-wing dominionists, and the Minutemen jumping on board. It would be poetic justice for the Republicans if we managed to engineer a Nader in reverse – Gilcrest got over 25% of the vote running for Congress in a 2006 special election. There will be places in the country that would normally vote for the Republican which will see significant chunks of supporters vote for Jim Gilchrist and his unholy alliance.
Get Hooked!
Clinton and Gore’s accomplishments
Speeches:
A few days ago, scientists announced alarming new evidence of the rapid melting of the perennial ice of the north polar cap, continuing a trend of the past several years that now confronts us with the prospect that human activities, if unchecked in the next decade, could destroy one of the earth’s principle mechanisms for cooling itself. Another group of scientists presented evidence that human activities are responsible for the dramatic warming of sea surface temperatures in the areas of the ocean where hurricanes form. A few weeks earlier, new information from yet another team showed dramatic increases in the burning of forests throughout the American West, a trend that has increased decade by decade, as warmer temperatures have dried out soils and vegetation. All these findings come at the end of a summer with record breaking temperatures and the hottest twelve month period ever measured in the U.S., with persistent drought in vast areas of our country. Scientific American introduces the lead article in its special issue this month with the following sentence: “The debate on global warming is over.”
When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an Executive, whether he be a King or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.
It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation’s handiwork and assess the quality of our generation’s stewardship at the beginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he – the president – label any citizen an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen’s liberty – even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal.
As Aristotle once said of virtue, respect for the rule of law is “one thing.”
It is indivisible.
And so long as it remains indivisible, so will our country.
But if either major political party is ever so beguiled by a lust for power that it abandons this unifying principle, then the fabric of our democracy will be torn.
The survival of freedom depends upon the rule of law.
The rule of law depends, in turn, upon the respect each generation of Americans has for the integrity with which our laws are written, interpreted and enforced.
That necessary respect depends not only on the representative nature of our legislative branch, but also on the deliberative character of its proceedings. As James Madison envisioned, ours is a “deliberative democracy.” Indeed, its deliberative nature is fundamental to the integrity of our social compact. Because the essential alchemy of democracy — whereby just power is derived from the consent of the governed — can only occur in a process that is genuinely deliberative.
Moreover, it is the unique role of the Senate, much more than the House, to provide a forum for deliberation, to give adequate and full consideration to the strongly held views of a minority. In this case, the minority is made up of 44 Democratic Senators and 1 Independent.
And it is no accident that our founders gave the Senate the power to pass judgment on the fitness of nominees to the Judicial branch. Because they knew that respect for the law also depends upon the perceived independence and integrity of our judges. And they wanted those qualities to be reviewed by the more reflective body of Congress.
Our founders gave no role to the House of Representatives in confirming federal judges. If they had believed that a simple majority was all that was needed to safeguard the nation against unwise choices by a partisan president, they might well have given the House as well as the Senate the power to vote on judges.
For America’s first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go bang on your door and yell, “Open up!” Then, if you didn’t quickly open up, they could knock the door down. Also, if they seized anything, they had to leave a list explaining what they had taken. That way, if it was all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your stuff back.
But that’s all changed now. Starting two years ago, federal agents were given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to “sneak and peak” in non-terrorism cases. They can secretly enter your home with no warning — whether you are there or not — and they can wait for months before telling you they were there. And it doesn’t have to have any relationship to terrorism whatsoever. It applies to any garden-variety crime. And the new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional warrant — simply by saying that searching your house might have some connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a foreign power. Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.
Three weeks ago, in a speech at FBI Headquarters, President Bush went even further and formally proposed that the Attorney General be allowed to authorize subpoenas by administrative order, without the need for a warrant from any court.
What about the right to consult a lawyer if you’re arrested? Is that important?
Attorney General Ashcroft has issued regulations authorizing the secret monitoring of attorney-client conversations on his say-so alone; bypassing procedures for obtaining prior judicial review for such monitoring in the rare instances when it was permitted in the past. Now, whoever is in custody has to assume that the government is always listening to consultations between them and their lawyers.
Does it matter if the government listens in on everything you say to your lawyer? Is that Ok?
How could that happen?
Could it possibly have been intentional?
Well, there are some clues … the fear campaign aimed at Iraq was timed for the kickoff of the midterm election campaign of 2002 — you know, the one where Max Cleland, who lost three limbs fighting for America in Vietnam, was accused of being unpatriotic.
The curious timing was explained by the president’s chief of staff as a marketing decision — timed for the post-Labor Day advertising period.
For everything there is a season — particularly the politics of fear.
And it did serve to distract attention from pesky domestic issues like the economy, which were, after all, beginning to worry the White House in the summer of 2002.
And of course there is now voluminous evidence that the powerful clique inside the administration that had been agitating for war against Iraq since before the inauguration immediately seized upon the tragedy of 9/11 as a terrific opportunity to accomplish what they had not been able to do beforehand: invade a country that had not attacked us and didn’t threaten us.
They were clever and they managed to get the job done.
