Fear Leads To Anger, Anger Leads To Hate, Hate Leads To Suffering

For those of us bloggers and pundits on the right, an Al Gore speech is just a gift that keeps on giving. Here's the full horror:

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

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There's really too much leftist nujobbery here to cover in one sitting, as Powerline has noted. Surely, Gore recognizes the irony of accusing Bush of "sexual depravity" and being "the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon," given who Gore sold his soul to.

Michele accurately captures the spirit of the speech (you missed a lot if you didn't see or hear quite how unglued Gore sounded and looked). John Podhoretz thinks Gore has genuinely lost his mind. Gore begins to remind me of Johnny Sack from the Sopranos, driven to self-destructive extremes by his resentments:

Tony: He used to be a pragmatist.
Silvio: Some people are better at being No. 2's.

I realize Bush wouldn't have handled losing as Gore did very well either; few politicians would have, although I suspect that Bush would have had the discipline to hold his team together for a rematch in 2004. Nixon is the worst example: he truly became the Nixon of Watergate because he believed he'd been robbed and cheated in 1960 (witness his abuse of the IRS after he believed the Kennedys had had him audited in the early 1960s). But Gore has gone so far off the deep end, it's scary to think how he would have handled crises in the White House; I dread the thought of him under the stresses that the War on Terror have brought.

I'll give Taranto the last word on the wages of believing your own overheated rhetoric:

How did the Dems come to such a pass? In large part, it's Gore's fault. The Democrats held the White House in 2000, at a time of apparent peace and prosperity. They should have won the election that year, and they surely would have had they only had a decent candidate. But instead they had Al Gore. . . .

There's a telling line right at the beginning of Gore's speech: George W. Bush, he says, "has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon." Here Gore is engaging in what psychologists call "projection": attributing one's own faults to others. The most dishonest president since Richard Nixon obviously is the one who was impeached for lying under oath--the president, that is, whose No. 2 was none other than Al Gore.

Gore would have become president had Bill Clinton resigned after his 1998 impeachment, or had 17 Democratic senators voted to convict him in his impeachment trial. President Gore likely would have been re-elected in 2000, since he would have had the advantage of incumbency and been free of the Clinton taint that (unaccompanied by the Clinton charm) hurt him so much in the "red" states.

Instead, party discipline held, and the Senate acquitted Clinton. This was another missed opportunity for Gore. Had he publicly broken from Clinton and called on the president to resign, other Democrats might well have followed his lead. Instead, he appeared at a White House rally immediately after the impeachment vote and described Clinton as "a man who I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents."

Thus it was Al Gore, more than anyone else, who assured the election of George W. Bush as president. And if Gore actually believes all the paranoid nonsense he utters about "global warming," "an unprecedented assault on civil liberties," the "American gulag," the "catastrophe" in Iraq and so on, he let down not only his party but his country and the world, which will soon be destroyed thanks to Bush's decision to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty.

That's more guilt than anyone should be forced to endure.