Some good points, some bad points, and some lies, all from...
AL GORE DELIVERS REMARKS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY ON PRESIDENT BUSH'S IRAQ POLICY
Thu Aug 07 2003 11:48:22 ET
http://www.moveon.org/gore-speech.html
(these excerpts are from the actual text spoken, and may differ from the prepared speech linked to above)
[...]
Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right.
[...]
I'm convinced one reason we've had so many nasty surprises in our economy is that the country somehow got lots of false impressions about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted, including: one, the tax cuts would unleash a lot of new investment that would create lots of new jobs; two, we wouldn't have to worry about a return to big budget deficits, because all the new growth in the economy caused by the tax cuts would lead to a lot of new revenue; three, most of the benefits would go to average middle-income families not to the wealthy, as some partisans claimed.
Unfortunately, here, too, every single one of these impressions turned out to be wrong. Instead of creating jobs, for example, we are losing millions of jobs: three years in a row of net losses. That hasn't happened since the Great Depression.
As I've noted before, I was the first one laid off.
And you never forget something like that.
And it turns out that most of the benefits of the tax cuts actually are going to the highest-income Americans, who, unfortunately, are the least likely group to spend money in ways that create jobs during times when the economy is weak and unemployment is rising.
And, of course, the budget deficits are already the biggest ever, with the worst still due to hit us. As a percentage of our economy, we have had bigger deficits, but these are by far the most dangerous we've ever had for two reasons. First, they're not temporary; they're structural and long-term. Second, they're going to get even bigger just at the time when the big baby boomer retirement surge starts. Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe.
[...]
It seems obvious to me that big and important issues, like the Bush economic policy and the first preemptive war in U.S. history, should have been debate more thoroughly in the Congress and covered more extensively in the news media and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen. And now in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impressions that were given when the votes and the die were cast.
Since this curious mismatch between myth and reality has suddenly become commonplace and is causing such extreme difficulty for the nation's ability to make good sensible choices about our future, maybe it's time to focus on how in the world we could have gotten so many false impressions in such a short period of time.
[...]
So here's the pattern that I see linking all this together. The President's mishandling of, and selective use of, the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq, is pretty much the same as they way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals. In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen well in advance of the facts that were designed to benefit friends and supporters, and has then used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny essential in our system of checks and balances.
The Administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on. Which, in it's purest form, is that government is very bad, and should be done away with as much as possible, except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.
And for the same reason that they push the impression that government is very bad, they also promote the myth that there really is no such thing as the public interest. What's important to them is private interests, and what they really mean is that those who have a lot of wealth and power should be left alone rather than be called upon to reinvest in society through taxes.
[...]
Maybe one reason that false impressions have played a bigger role than they should, is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in they way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.
[...]
One thing the president could do to facilitate the restoration of checks and balances is to stop blocking reasonable efforts from the congress to play its rightful role. I'll give you one example. He could order his appointees to cooperate fully with the bipartisan national commission on terrorist attacks, headed by former Republican governor Tom Caine (ph), and he should let them examine how the white house handled the warnings that are said to have been given to the president by the intelligence community.
[...]
And speaking of the Patriot Act, the President ought to rein in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuse of civil rights that have twice been documented by the Inspector General of the Justice Department itself. And while he's at it, he needs to rein in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that Total Information Awareness program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.
This Administration hastened from the very beginning to persuade us that defending America can't be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place American citizens, if the executive branch so chooses, in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts and not even let 'em see a lawyer. That view is both wrong, and my friends it is fundamentally un-American.
Maybe the most urgent need for new oversight of the Executive Branch and the restoration of checks and balances is in the realm of security, and there the Administration is now asking that we accept a whole cluster of new myths.
For example, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was an effort to strike a bargain between states that have nuclear weapons and all others who pledge to refrain from developing them. This Administration has rejected this historic accomplishment, and now, incredibly, wants to embark on a brand new program to build a new generation of small nuclear bombs to bust bunkers under the ground. In my opinion, this would be true madness, and the point of no return to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, exactly at the time when we and our allies are trying to prevent a resumption of a nuclear arms race triggered by a nuclear testing breakout by North Korean and Iran. We need to stop that, and one of the ways to stop it is with arms control, not building new nuclear bombs.
[...]
And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that phrase was all about. But hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country.
For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers, an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation, honest advocacy for the environment, real compassion for the poor, a strengthening of the military as recently proven, and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented, and courageously pursued in the face of scorched earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every Administration in recent memory has displayed it.
[...]
I'm proud that my party has candidates for president committed to those values. I admire the effort and skill they are putting into their campaigns. I'm not going to join them, but later in the political cycle I will endorse one of them, because I believe we must stand for a future in which the United States will again be feared only by our enemies, in which our country will again lead the effort to create an international order based on the rule of law, a nation which upholds fundamental rights, even for those it believes to be captured enemies, a nation whose financial house is in order, a nation where the marketplace is kept healthy by effective government scrutiny, a nation that does what's necessary to provide for the health, education, and welfare of our people, a society in which citizens of all faiths enjoy equal standing, a republic once again comfortable that its chief executive knows the limits, as well as the powers, of the presidency, a nation that places the highest value on facts, not ideology, as the basis for all its great debates and decisions.
We can have that kind of nation. What you are doing will make it more possible. We have work to do.
Thank you very much for being here. Thank you.
AL GORE DELIVERS REMARKS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY ON PRESIDENT BUSH'S IRAQ POLICY
Thu Aug 07 2003 11:48:22 ET
http://www.moveon.org/gore-speech.html
(these excerpts are from the actual text spoken, and may differ from the prepared speech linked to above)
[...]
Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right.
[...]
I'm convinced one reason we've had so many nasty surprises in our economy is that the country somehow got lots of false impressions about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted, including: one, the tax cuts would unleash a lot of new investment that would create lots of new jobs; two, we wouldn't have to worry about a return to big budget deficits, because all the new growth in the economy caused by the tax cuts would lead to a lot of new revenue; three, most of the benefits would go to average middle-income families not to the wealthy, as some partisans claimed.
Unfortunately, here, too, every single one of these impressions turned out to be wrong. Instead of creating jobs, for example, we are losing millions of jobs: three years in a row of net losses. That hasn't happened since the Great Depression.
As I've noted before, I was the first one laid off.
And you never forget something like that.
And it turns out that most of the benefits of the tax cuts actually are going to the highest-income Americans, who, unfortunately, are the least likely group to spend money in ways that create jobs during times when the economy is weak and unemployment is rising.
And, of course, the budget deficits are already the biggest ever, with the worst still due to hit us. As a percentage of our economy, we have had bigger deficits, but these are by far the most dangerous we've ever had for two reasons. First, they're not temporary; they're structural and long-term. Second, they're going to get even bigger just at the time when the big baby boomer retirement surge starts. Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe.
[...]
It seems obvious to me that big and important issues, like the Bush economic policy and the first preemptive war in U.S. history, should have been debate more thoroughly in the Congress and covered more extensively in the news media and better presented to the American people before our nation made such fateful choices. But that didn't happen. And now in both cases, reality is turning out to be very different from the impressions that were given when the votes and the die were cast.
Since this curious mismatch between myth and reality has suddenly become commonplace and is causing such extreme difficulty for the nation's ability to make good sensible choices about our future, maybe it's time to focus on how in the world we could have gotten so many false impressions in such a short period of time.
[...]
So here's the pattern that I see linking all this together. The President's mishandling of, and selective use of, the best evidence available on the threat posed by Iraq, is pretty much the same as they way he intentionally distorted the best available evidence on climate change and rejected the best available evidence on the threat posed to America's economy by his tax and budget proposals. In each case, the President seems to have been pursuing policies chosen well in advance of the facts that were designed to benefit friends and supporters, and has then used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny essential in our system of checks and balances.
The Administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of the one central doctrine that all of the special interests agree on. Which, in it's purest form, is that government is very bad, and should be done away with as much as possible, except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.
And for the same reason that they push the impression that government is very bad, they also promote the myth that there really is no such thing as the public interest. What's important to them is private interests, and what they really mean is that those who have a lot of wealth and power should be left alone rather than be called upon to reinvest in society through taxes.
[...]
Maybe one reason that false impressions have played a bigger role than they should, is that both Congress and the news media have been less vigilant and exacting than they should have been in they way they have tried to hold the Administration accountable.
[...]
One thing the president could do to facilitate the restoration of checks and balances is to stop blocking reasonable efforts from the congress to play its rightful role. I'll give you one example. He could order his appointees to cooperate fully with the bipartisan national commission on terrorist attacks, headed by former Republican governor Tom Caine (ph), and he should let them examine how the white house handled the warnings that are said to have been given to the president by the intelligence community.
[...]
And speaking of the Patriot Act, the President ought to rein in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuse of civil rights that have twice been documented by the Inspector General of the Justice Department itself. And while he's at it, he needs to rein in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that Total Information Awareness program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.
This Administration hastened from the very beginning to persuade us that defending America can't be done without seriously abridging the protections of the Constitution for American citizens, up to and including an asserted right to place American citizens, if the executive branch so chooses, in a form of limbo totally beyond the authority of our courts and not even let 'em see a lawyer. That view is both wrong, and my friends it is fundamentally un-American.
Maybe the most urgent need for new oversight of the Executive Branch and the restoration of checks and balances is in the realm of security, and there the Administration is now asking that we accept a whole cluster of new myths.
For example, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was an effort to strike a bargain between states that have nuclear weapons and all others who pledge to refrain from developing them. This Administration has rejected this historic accomplishment, and now, incredibly, wants to embark on a brand new program to build a new generation of small nuclear bombs to bust bunkers under the ground. In my opinion, this would be true madness, and the point of no return to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, exactly at the time when we and our allies are trying to prevent a resumption of a nuclear arms race triggered by a nuclear testing breakout by North Korean and Iran. We need to stop that, and one of the ways to stop it is with arms control, not building new nuclear bombs.
[...]
And as for honor and integrity, let me say this: we know what that phrase was all about. But hear me well, not as a candidate for any office, but as an American citizen who loves my country.
For eight years, the Clinton-Gore Administration gave this nation honest budget numbers, an economic plan with integrity that rescued the nation from debt and stagnation, honest advocacy for the environment, real compassion for the poor, a strengthening of the military as recently proven, and a foreign policy whose purposes were elevated, candidly presented, and courageously pursued in the face of scorched earth tactics by the opposition. That is also a form of honor and integrity, and not every Administration in recent memory has displayed it.
[...]
I'm proud that my party has candidates for president committed to those values. I admire the effort and skill they are putting into their campaigns. I'm not going to join them, but later in the political cycle I will endorse one of them, because I believe we must stand for a future in which the United States will again be feared only by our enemies, in which our country will again lead the effort to create an international order based on the rule of law, a nation which upholds fundamental rights, even for those it believes to be captured enemies, a nation whose financial house is in order, a nation where the marketplace is kept healthy by effective government scrutiny, a nation that does what's necessary to provide for the health, education, and welfare of our people, a society in which citizens of all faiths enjoy equal standing, a republic once again comfortable that its chief executive knows the limits, as well as the powers, of the presidency, a nation that places the highest value on facts, not ideology, as the basis for all its great debates and decisions.
We can have that kind of nation. What you are doing will make it more possible. We have work to do.
Thank you very much for being here. Thank you.
Every time he opens his suck-hole something funny comes out. I wish they'd tape his stuff so I could get popcorn and sit down for a really good laugh!!! 