By BDN Staff
Saturday, December 15, 2007 - Bangor Daily News
In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, former Vice President Al Gore warned the United States and China that they will be held accountable "before history" if they fail to be leaders in fighting global warming.
Well said, Al, but future historians will be just as likely to hold you accountable about your own abdication of responsibility if you do not enter the 2008 presidential race.
Future historians will of course emphasize that Gore actually won the popular vote in the presidential election in 2000 but because of an anachronistic Electoral College and a politically partisan U.S. Supreme Court, was denied the presidency. They will also write glowingly about Gore’s early and strong stance against the Iraq war. And, of course, in noting his Nobel Peace Prize, they will extol his activism in alerting the global community, and Americans particularly, about the impending environmental collapse due to climate change and global warming.
But the same historians can also be expected to criticize Gore the environmentalist because he opted out of the presidential race at precisely the time when the world most needed an American president who possessed the gravitas, vision and skill to reassert American leadership in solving what is arguably the most monumental problem confronting the planet….
