Dead Horse: Al Gore: So Close (2011 edition)

Keith Olbermann interviews his new boss, big Al Gore. I used to be really enthusiastic about Gore, and voted for him in 2000. I used to tell people that if he had been president in 2001-2005, that yes, he probably would have made war against the Taliban but not against Iraq, and we would have been out of Afghanistan by 2004, or even earlier. Did I know this? Obviously I didn't, anymore than the people who knew he would have fabricated evidence against Saddam and gone to war with him, just like the other Junior in the 2000 race eventually did. (That begs the question of whether even the Afghan invasion of late 2001 was justifiable, but it may have been next to impossible for a sitting president at that point, in our system, to avoid at least "a little" military action.)

For better or worse Al Gore will likely go down in history not primarily as the 45th vice-president of the United States, nor for the Nobel Prize, nor the lock-box and the sighing from the 2000 prez debates, or even for trying to suck his wife's face clean off in front of millions at the Dem convention in L.A. that summer. Instead he'll be primarily remembered for winning the popular vote and losing the White House in that excruciatingly close election, the funny business in Florida, Bush v. Gore, etc.

I did find myself wondering if his call for a 'nonviolent American Spring' in this interview was essentially a call for a Democratic party led co-opting of populist angst, designed to neuter it into irrelevance, but maybe that's being uncharitable or excessively suspicious. Otherwise, Gore comes pretty close here too, sounding good for the first six and a half minutes of this interview.

The Weekly World News folks also watched this, and discussed Olbermann's interview with Gore:

“We need to have an American spring, you know, the Arab spring. The non-violent part of it isn’t finished yet, but we need to have an American spring. A kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change where people from the grassroots get involved again. Not the, you know, not in the Tea Party style,’” Al Gore said on Current TV’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”

“There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party. I understand that. But that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch Brothers, and promoted on Fox News,” Gore said.

Gore said that he would happily lead the revolution but that he is “afraid of large crowds.”