Back when Al Gore was running against George W. Bush, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about Gore. And I knew a lot of people that couldn’t see much difference between them. I struggled to explain just how evil Bush and his team were. All I could really come up with is that they would take us to war in Iraq and that they would loot the treasury. Unfortunately, I had nothing in the way of proof to back me up. I kept thinking about how badly they would harm the country and I kept concluding that my imagination wasn’t robust enough to figure out how badly they would harm us. I was right.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
You knew Bush would invade Iraq back in 2000? I’m impressed.
I knew he would invade Iraq in 2000. Bush said as much to Texas Republicans, and in local interviews.
Maybe part of Al Gore’s problem was that he wouldn’t have been any better than Clinton. He was more of an Israel patsy than Clinton. In fact, the shamefully embarrassing level of his obeisance to AIPAC has only been topped by Obama – Gore’s eyes used to tear up during the part of his annual speech at the AIPAC convention where he declared his undying love for Israel. And people tend to forget that he was quite the “liberal hawk”.
As for me, I didn’t vote for him OR Bush, so my hands are clean either way. And no, I did not vote for Nader, and no, my third party protest vote did not affect the outcome, so you can blame me. My state went overwhelmingly for Gore.
can’t blame me. I really should proofread more carefully after midnight.
about Nader is weaselly.
I did vote for him and will gladly tell anyone.
when he ran against Bush I think you’d have been more enthusiastic. I know I would have.
Nope. I didn’t see it coming. I thought Bush was a buffoon, a sock puppet for the “wise” advisors around him who were supposed to reassure us that “the grownups were in charge.” I fully expected them to serve the interests of their corporate puppet masters but no way did I anticipate unprovoked war, torture, Constitution-smashing and economic ruin. If I had, I would have taken to the streets in protest, for goodness sake.
I expected Bush to play golf, cut brush and otherwise be an ineffectual, grinning fool. I expected Cheney et al to meet in secret — like he did with his “Energy Task Force” — and be ahellavalot more subtle about destroying the government. I figured that neocon plan for the new century was too blatant to pull off. I didn’t credit the “new Pearl Harbor” part and expected more of a Gulf of Tonkin off-camera justification that most people wouldn’t accept.
Seriously, BooMan, if you anticipated this level of disaster, how did you calmly write blog posts instead of forming a revolutionary cell?
Wasn’t 2000 pre-blog?
Hey – I was saying the same thing. Any of us who were of a certain age and lived through Bush’s father knew what we were in for. Bush Sr. allowed the wholesale looting of the Savings and Loans across the country. Bush Jr.’s brother was one of the looters (look up Silverado to see that story).
Bush Sr. took us into Gulf War I on false pretenses. Colin Powell help up what he purported was a satellite photo showing Iraqi troops massing at the border of Kuwait. It was a forgery, we learned later. And then forgot, later, thanks to the lack of any historical reporting in this country.
It is not that hard to look at the past and correctly predict the future. It only looks like magic if you don’t know what had come before.
over at Salon.com in 1999-2000 (and so were many others) prior to the term “blogging” being invented.
While there I predicted Gore would lose to Bush and was constantly flamed for doing so.
A Gore “landslide” victory was the prediction of 99% of the people on the Salon forum.
Nobody could see this one coming. We knew it would be bad, we even hyperventilated (as we’d been doing for decades) that Bush would be the ruination of America/the world. I knew we wouldn’t get done what desperately needed doing. I knew we’d regress instead of progress.
But I don’t believe anybody who claims they really knew that Bush would bring this country to its knees in every possible aspect of its being. That the fruit of his works would make Bin Laden and the terrorists of the world seem like, at most, minor pests by comparison. That he would destroy this country’s standing in the world, poison our economic viability for decades to come, subvert the most basic constitutional foundations of our society, contract for the murder of hundreds of thousands of humans who had done nothing to us, and complete Reagan’s work of turning the United States into a classic fascist regime designed to be bled dry by bankers, financial swindlers, militarists, and their political courtiers.
Or to put it comcisely, I didn’t believe America had it in it to turn this bad, this fast, no matter who “led” it. I don’t think anybody had the imagination to foresee that.