“You’ve been given a great gift, George. A chance to see what the world would be like without you.
— Clarence the Angel, “It’s a Wonderful Life”
No Americans died in Iraq this year.
No Iraqi prisoners were beaten or tortured. Those pictures in The Washington Post were never there. Donald Rumsfeld? He and George W. Bush spent the last four years fishing in Texas.
Al Gore is president.
You remember. In November 2000, Florida was hit by a tsunami that wiped out the lower half of the state. They didn’t count Florida’s electoral votes in the election, and Gore took the popular vote and the electoral vote in an Everest-sized landslide.
So American soldiers never invaded Iraq. Sure, after Sept. 11 we sent a fleet of Marines to Afghanistan’s hills for Osama bin Laden. And we thought about sending soldiers into Iraq when a top White House official thought there might be weapons of mass destruction there.
But our president, exercising a wonderful quality called patience, waited for a United Nations inspection team to conclude its search in Iraq. “No WMDs, no invasion,” Gore famously declared in his Memorial Day speech in 2003.
Of course, under Gore, our environment is more Mother Earth than Father Oil.
Instead of plundering America’s resources like a pirate, Gore introduced forward-thinking initiatives so we could be independent of other countries’ oil resources. Gore drove to many functions in an electric-powered limousine and introduced an alternative-fuel bill to congress. By 2025, every new car will have to be a gas-electric hybrid or all electric.
Yes, Gore is still boring. He uses big words and his delivery is about as bland as an unsalted cracker.
But, somehow, he commands the respect of our allies across the world. He favors diplomacy over force. He listens to other leaders before making decisions. He doesn’t flash American machismo around the world like a calling card.
I say it’s better to be boring than stupid.
Al Gore didn’t cut taxes for country-club cuties. He believes in maintaining our surplus, rather than creating a trillion-buck deficit with the lethal combination of tax cuts and military spending.
Gore spent money on education and the economy. He believed that schools should spend less money on national bubble-filled Scantrons and more money on art and extracurriculars.
Here in Oregon, we felt the effects of Gore’s emphasis on higher education. We built a new basketball arena with extra funds. We created more scholarships and built a new campus in Bend. In Eugene, the school board opened two new elementary schools instead of closing them.
Sure, the grass is always greener on the other side of the voting booth, but I think we made the right choice electing Al Gore.
Re-elect Gore in ’04.
It’s a wonderful life, yes?