Tired of Waiting for Gore?

Then sign this petition and wave the bloody shirt.

I'm fed up with their surge, and I'm going with my own initial urge experienced in December of '04, (right after Kerry failed to retire the worst president in U.S. History). That's exactly when this vintage Gore '08 sticker went up on my vintage automobile.
Since 2000, nothing has been accomplished - certainly no 'mission' - but much has happened for Al Gore.

In these pages and others', I have long argued that Al Gore has nothing to win and everything to lose in having another go at the meat-grinder of Presidential politics. Against the backdrop (an amazingly appropriate expression) of the Bush-Cheney record, he has already demonstrated to historians that he is the greatest un-inaugurated president ever elected. If he does nothing more than what he is doing now, his increasingly exalted place in history is assured. The Economist put it this way:

Things just keep on getting better for Al Gore. He is not only a global-warming guru—the man who changed the climate of opinion on climate change—he is also an all-purpose political guru as well. He was mocked back in 2000 for accusing George Bush of “risky schemes”. Since then Mr Bush has turned into a Pandora's box of risky schemes. He was ridiculed in America back in 2002 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq. Few would ridicule him today. Europeans only have to look at Mr Gore (and these days there is slightly more of him to look at) to think of what life might have been like without the Toxic Texan. Surely he will soon have a Nobel peace prize to add to his Oscar.

So I have been asking every time Gore's name comes up, 'What's in it for him?' The obvious answer is that America needs Al Gore more than Al needs to be president. Or, as Eugene Robinson puts it, America Likes an Idiot, but It Needs Al Gore. I keep hearing snippets of brilliance. C-Span recently aired Gore's 50 impromptu minutes at George Washington University to which you can catch a link on SwiftSpeech. Trophy Wife Tivo-ed Charlie Rose's priceless interview for me, which you can grab on BlueMassGroup. (You can listen in the background while your 'Net surfing continues, as I am as I write this.)

Gore is the single candidate who is larger than the huge issues facing us. For me, he is the most prominent of the narrow circle of Democratic leaders who was right both on Gulf War I (1991) and on Bush's Invasion of Iraq (2003). He can speak to the importance of understanding how we got into Iraq-Nam; that understanding is essential to knowing how to extricate ourselves from that cluster-blunder as well as how to avoid additional ones. More than targeting Bush-Cheney, Inc., Gore's focus is on how phonies masquerading as wartime leaders were for so long tolerated by our media and a non-checking, non-balancing Congress. In a few short years he has established himself as an authority on American Media and its uncritical fraudcasting of errant political mythologies. Reason is the foundation of political democracy and Gore's critique, The Assault on Reason, seizes at the roots of the current American malaise. Gore speaks directly to the need to harness scientific methods to redress multi-faceted American crimes of commission and omission by “faith-based policies” in this short century. Not the least of these, of course, is Republicans' denial of An Inconvenient Truth, which is nothing short of appeasement of a future global holocaust.

Americans have been monstrously served in the last eight years. They deserve a momentously corrective change in course. They also have much for which to redeem themselves vis-a-vis the rest of the world. How better to accomplish this than by choosing the road not chosen for them before? How better to begin the reversal of the last eight years than with an absolute and unqualified repudiation of Bush and Cheney?

Let's be perfectly frank about it. We have been swift-boated and bitch-slapped for all of this short century. For Gore to become president would be for the earth-antagonist and government-hostile Republicans their worst nightmare. For Gore to become president eight years after the great train robbery in Florida would be a revenge served cold of Nixonian and Shakespearian proportions. Under a more positive interpretation, a Gore presidency would correct the course of American history and come the closest - of all Democratic alternatives - to annulling the Bush era.

If Al Gore gives us a second chance and chooses on 1-Nov-2007 to run for President, Americans cannot afford to decline his offer.