Rage Against the Dying of Our Rights!
Rage in a week full of profound speeches by patriotic progressives, President Al Gore’s stood head and shoulders above the rest. The right-wing dominated media will, of course, attempt to make him look like a raving lunatic by printing everything he said word-for word. They pulled the same trick on Howard Dean. So it’s important that unbiased and objective pundits such as myself set the record straight.
Al Gore’s powerful oratory Monday was not only a testament to the skills of his lesbian manliness coach, but a righteous roar of rage against Bush’s wholesale destruction of our most fundamental civil liberties. For the past six years, Gore has sat quietly by while Republicans furiously chipped away at the Bill of Rights. However, the news of Bush’s domestic spying program was the last straw, and as a patriotic American War Hero he was duty bound to stand up and say, “Enough is enough!”.
Bush continues to deny that he has done anything wrong and insists that he will only eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of people who are “a threat to national security”. But that could describe just about any liberal Democrat in Congress. Does Sen. Kennedy deserve to have his phone sex interrupted for the sake of Bush's war on terror? And what of the thousands of legitimate calls to and from terrorists every day? What if you or I were to simply dial Osama Bin Laden’s number at Crawford by mistake? Does that make us terrorists? Does that negate our rights as American citizens?
Al Gore doesn’t think so.
Bush also claims that his new American Police State is for our own protection. He insists that spying on terrorists may actually prevent another attack on our soil. Maybe so. But at what cost? What good are a few American lives if they are saved at the expense of our most precious civil liberties? The right to carry box cutters onto planes. The right to leak classified information to the New York Times. The right to make long distance phone calls to Al Qaida. All sacrificed in the name of national defense.
Thousands willingly gave their lives to secure us such cherished freedoms. If a few thousand more must die to maintain them, then that’s a price Al Gore is perfectly willing to pay.
