Al Gore has never impressed me greatly. He always struck me as a man born to be Vice President, and to be the butt of my all-time favorite knock-knock joke:
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"Vice President [Name of current Vice President]."
"Vice President [Name of current Vice President] who?"
"They warned me about this job."
On the other hand, I didn't exactly need to hold my nose to vote for him over Chicken George.
But I never felt the urge to say to him, "Yes, you've got it, you said exactly the right thing today, when it needed to be said!" before Wednesday.
But then he gave a speech at a MoveOn rally in Washington about the current schemes afoot to undermine Cogressional procedures, in order to force a vote on Bush's seven worst judicial nominees. He reminded us that he was himself the victim of an outrageously partisan Supreme Court decision, and had been forced to ask his supporters to swallow it and move on.
Gore then added that "if the confirmation of those justices in the majority had been forced through by running roughshod over 200 years of Senate precedents and engineered by a crass partisan decision on a narrow party line vote to break the Senate's rules of procedure—then no speech imaginable could have calmed the passions aroused in our country.
"As Aristotle once said of virtue, respect for the rule of law is 'one thing.'
"It is indivisible.
"And so long as it remains indivisible, so will our country.
"But if either major political party is ever so beguiled by a lust for power that it abandons this unifying principle, then the fabric of our democracy will be torn."
Testify, brother Albert.
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