Our Friend Al Gore

BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, February 13, 2006 12:44 p.m.

The man who came within a hair's breadth of the presidency in 2000 is denouncing his own government on foreign soil, the Associated Press reports:
Former Vice President Al Gore told a mainly Saudi audience on Sunday that the U.S. government committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that most Americans did not support such treatment....
...There is a comical element to this, as Glenn Reynolds notes: "Only Al Gore could come up with the idea of criticizing Bush for not sucking up to the Saudis enough. Sigh."
Heh. Indeed. But blogger "TigerHawk" makes some serious points:
This is asinine both substantively and procedurally... The only consolation is that Gore likely would have done a lot more damage had he spent four years in the White House. And given the precedent set by Jimmy Carter, it isn't hard to imagine Gore as an embittered one-term ex-president giving the same speech in Jeddah....

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