GORE GOES GA-GA
John Podhoretz, New York Post
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May 27, 2004 -- I'VE been on many radio shows in the past few months talking about President Bush, and I've invariably been asked to justify the view that Bush made a place for himself in history by responding quickly and forcefully to the 9/11 attacks.
Surely, say hosts and callers, it didn't matter all that much who was president on 9/11, because Al Gore would have reacted and acted in exactly the same way. I have usually responded by saying that, yes, I think he might well have responded similarly.
I was wrong. There is no way of knowing how he would have responded, because it is now clear that Al Gore is insane.
I don't mean that his policy ideas are insane, though many of them are. I mean that based on his behavior, conduct, mien and tone over the past two days, there is every reason to believe that Albert Gore Jr., desperately needs help. I think he needs medication, and I think that if he is already on medication, his doctors need to adjust it or change it entirely.
I am not kidding or trying to score a cheap rhetorical shot when I say that watching Gore rant and rave and scream and yell and lose all connection with reality, common sense and even proper comportment at this moment of great stress for the Republic, even his most passionate supporters should thank God that he was not the one whose hand was on the Bible on Jan. 20, 2001.
In a speech yesterday denouncing U.S. policy in Iraq, he compared George W. Bush first to Richard Nixon, which is excessive. Then he compared Bush to Faust and said the president had lost his soul in pursuit of a policy of "domination."
He accused the United States of setting up an "American Gulag," thus comparing the incidents at Abu Ghraib to Josef Stalin's vast slave-prison archipelago that shackled nearly 30 million people in an Arctic wasteland and caused the deaths of many millions more.
He has, in essence, declared that the monstrous American creeps we've seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs are victims as much as those they humiliated: "On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush."
Gore's speech is the single craziest political performance of my lifetime, and I use the word "craziest" advisedly. The speech, at 6,600 words, was twice as long as Bush's address to the nation on Monday night. The indiscipline shown by the sheer endlessness of Gore's address is a reflection of the psychic morass in which he has become mired.
A man who was very, very nearly president of the United States has been reduced to sounding like one of those people in Times Square with a megaphone screaming about God's justice. It is almost impossible to believe that this man was once vice president of the United States.
As a stalwart supporter of the war, I would naturally be inclined to find Gore's line of attack discomfiting and upsetting, even enraging. Instead, I feel an intense sadness and a great sense of relief. The sadness comes from the sight of a man losing his sanity in public. The relief comes from the fact that he is not, and never will be, the president of the United States.
E-mail:
podhoretz@nypost.com