Gore Gone Crazy

What has happened to Al Gore? Just a few years ago he was one of the most respected politicians in Washington; he was considered intelligent, thoughtful, and level-headed. But after losing the 2000 elections, after many attempted machinations to overturn the vote and gain the presidency, Gore seems to have lost any anchoring to reality that he had. A perfect example of his recent detachment from the real world came in yesterday's speech to MoveOn.org, a radical leftist organization. The speech is way too long and obnoxious to quote. David Horowitz and Ben Johnson provide a reading of the speech. And John Podhoretz, in his column, feels sorry for Gore's descent into madness and takes comfort in the fact that Gore is not President:

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.

It's difficult to find an explanation for Gore's present actions. Does he really think that aligning himself with the lunatic fringe of the Democratic Party will get him back to power? Or is it merely the understanding that he will not be in power that has removed the political fetters and unleashed his true self?