Monday, November 10, 2003 |
15:38 - The Easily Impressed Orphans
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MoveOn.org calls this speech by Al Gore "remarkable":
"I want to challenge the Bush Administration’s implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists.
Because it is simply not true.
In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.
In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.
In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.
In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.
In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America."
According to MoveOn.org, Gore was "not mincing words". Well, if he's trying to make Religious Reich salsa, he's going to have to mince these words a little bit finer, because I don't see anything "remarkable" or "damning" or even "new" here. Just more expansive rhetoric about all the freedoms we've given up, though I've yet to hear anybody actually be able to name one way in which Americans are less free than we were before 9/11. I guess Gore must have listed some in his speech (the e-mail links to a streaming webcast version of it, which I'm not going to waste time watching), but MoveOn.org doesn't seem to have seen fit to have listed any in this call-to-arms-- preferring instead to use this vague and spurious digest, with its implicit assumptions of decimated civil liberties, as its above-the-fold banner.
The rest of the e-mail encapsulating it fairly pees on itself with glee over how amazing the speech was. Guys, just a note... the more you do this, the more people look at you with pity rather than with sympathy.
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