{"id":5535,"date":"2005-10-14T12:37:59","date_gmt":"2005-10-14T16:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5535"},"modified":"2005-10-14T12:37:59","modified_gmt":"2005-10-14T16:37:59","slug":"we-would-be-a-different-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/we-would-be-a-different-country\/","title":{"rendered":"‘We would be a different country’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Al Gore told reporters the other day that he had no intention of running for president again, but that’s not all he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When asked how the United States would have been different if he had become president, though, he had harsh criticism for Bush’s policies. <\/p>\n

“We would not have invaded a country that didn’t attack us,” he said, referring to Iraq. “We would not have taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families.” <\/p>\n

“We would not be trying to control and intimidate the news media. We would not be routinely torturing people,” Gore said. “We would be a different country.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s no real point in dwelling on what could have been, but Gore is obviously, painfully, right. Not surprisingly, the RNC fails to see it that way.<\/p>\n

Tracey Schmitt, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, called Gore’s comments “fictitious rants that border on dangerous.”<\/p>\n

“To accuse Americans of participating in ‘routine torture’ is absurd and reveals that while Al Gore may no longer be a leader in his party, he still embodies the maniacal anger that guides Democrat leaders in Washington today,” Schmitt wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As someone who’s had to write these kinds of emails, I’m vaguely sympathetic to Tracey Schmitt’s problem here. Gore’s right, Bush is wrong, and she has to come up with up with some kind of spin to deny reality. It is, to be sure, no easy task. But did a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee tell the AP, in writing, that Al Gore’s criticism of the president is almost “dangerous”?<\/p>\n

Apparently, the political world has made no progress at all. For Republicans, McCarthyism is still easier than thinking.<\/p>\n

For that matter, why, exactly, is it “absurd” to point out that torture has been “routine”? Is the RNC that unaware of, among other things, the revelations of Capt. Ian Fishback<\/a>? Has Tracey Schmitt not seen (or even heard of) the devastating report<\/a> prepared by Human Rights Watch documenting widespread and systematic abuse of detainees?<\/p>\n

And Republicans wonder why they have a credibility problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Al Gore told reporters the other day that he had no intention of running for president again, but that’s not all he said. When asked how the United States would have been different if he had become president, though, he had harsh criticism for Bush’s policies. “We would not have invaded a country that didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}