The other day, David Frum joined in the rightwing chorus by calling Al Gore's Greatest Speech Ever "crazy." It's not enough, of course, that Gore is already marginalised by the "Liberal" media; no, he must be gratuitously smeared, especially when he tells the truth and makes the finest rhetorical attack yet uttered agains this godawful administration.
Now that the first wave of Project Let's "Eagleton" Gore has been unleashed, some reactionaries have deigned to actually consider what Gore said on face value. One can imagine, then, that considering their frothing diatribes and rants on Gore's sanity that the speech would have a multitude of errors, lies, miscontruals, disingenuous phrases, non sequiturs, infelicities, and so on? Right? I mean, what else could elicit such wrath? For an oh-so-smart reactionary like Frum, picking the chaff from Gore's speech should be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, right?
Apparently not :
in the category of the bizarre, did you notice this odd passage?
Â?Kerry should not tie his own hands by offering overly specific, detailed proposals concerning a situation that is rapidly changing and, unfortunately, rapidly deteriorating, but should rather preserve his, and our countryÂ?s, options, to retrieve our national honor as soon as this long national nightmare is over.Â?
That sentence was immediately followed by this one: Â?Eisenhower did not propose a five-point plan for changing AmericaÂ?s approach to the Korean war when he was running for president in 1952.Â?
What do you suppose Gore was thinking as he uttered those words? Was Korea a Â?national nightmareÂ?? Does this former Democratic office holder really think that Harry Truman had put the Â?national honorÂ? at risk? Ronald Reagan used to irritate Democrats by claiming Harry Truman as an icon of contemporary conservatism. Is Gore conceding that Reagan was right?
That's the best that Frumbag can do? The man so intelligent that he and Richard Perle are alone qualified to offer a blueprint for the "End of Evil"?
Maybe there's just not enough hubris in tackling Gore's speech for what he actually said. Frum, after all, can only think big.
If not, perhaps, thinking big in his "analysis" of Gore's speech, he exerts bigtime torque in twisting something harmless and sensible into something ..well, to use his own word, "bizarre."
The point is that Eisenhower is seen by mainstream Americans as a perfectly decent candidate. Gore knows that, and he has to use an example of a Presidential Challenger doing the right thing vis-a-vis a war during an election year. Obviously he can't use the example of Richard Nixon, who did everything wrong that could be done wrong in '68 (and a personage for whom Frum and his gang are notoriously protective), he couldn't use McGovern from '72 even though he probably should, so he picked a neutral example, Ike, who did not meddle nor sabotage himself by offering detailed plans for Korea counter to Truman's.
As for the silly Reagan reference, the only reason Ronald Reagan would have said that, and for that matter, David Frum would resurrect it, is because both admire in Truman the decision to nuke Bad Guys -- that, and maybe Truman's participation in the immensely corrupt Pendergrast machine.
At any rate, trust Frum to make a mountain of this molehill -- and the fact that he did is a tacit admission that the really big charges Gore made are what -- unanswerable? I'm still waiting for a substantial rebuttal.
Above the Gore rant it's worth noting that Frum sneers at Amnesty International, which is nothing new but yet another reminder of why this bunch of fucktards sneered at a similar international body, the Red Cross. When speechwriters, politicos and hacks stick their pudgy fingers in the eyes of these organisations, it's no wonder that the troops on the ground follow suit and the result is utter contempt of Amnesty, HRW, and the RC -- and the international humanitarian laws whose compliance (or not) they monitor.
Frumbag: a fucking hack.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 12:00 AM
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