During Current TV’s coverage of the Republican National Convention, network founding chairman and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore conceded that one of the left’s favorite talking points no longer applies: You can’t continue to blame former President George W. Bush for everything.
“Obviously I’m not a fan of his presidency, but I want to make a point,” Gore said. “Things went so badly wrong they cannot all be laid at his doorstep. One quick example: When the Senate voted to go to war in Iraq, 77 percent of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attack. And yes, the administration put that impression out there, but where was the news media? Where were the responsible members of the Republican Party in the House and Senate and why weren’t more Democrats standing up to that upright falsehood?”
“The underlying point I’m making is we have serious problems in our democracy and all of the blame put on George W. Bush — I’m not defending him in any way, believe me — but I think sometimes that misses the larger point that our democracy is indeed in trouble. And all of us have an obligation to try to fix it.”
Watch:
“Global warming is real and they refuse to connect those dots,” he said. “We have the whole country suffering from this massive drought. West Nile Virus is directly connected to the conditions that global warming has made worse. The whole North polar ice cap is disappearing in front of our eyes. Twelve massive million-dollar-plus climate-related disasters and they keep coming.”
And that, Gore said, has something in common with the Iraq War.
“Just as they did not report the truth about the proposal to invade Iraq, we are not getting the accurate impression about this challenge that we have to face — to stop putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution up into the atmosphere every single day,” he said.
“They aren’t only doing nothing about it, there’s hardly any discussion about it. It drives me crazy.”