Why Al Gore Will Not Run
1. When people ask you about running simply smile that supercilious smile you have been perfecting for the past 30 years, shrug, and walk away.2. Meanwhile, instruct your staff, aides, advisors, friends, former employees and anyone else you have an e-mail address for to tell everyone they have an e-mail address for all the good reasons why would shouldn't run, without ever actually saying you wouldn't run.
2a. For instance, Paul Begala was quoted in the NY Times yesterday as saying:
"[Gore] knows there's a Democratic field that Democrats are happy with, and that they don't need a white knight riding in."That, back in the Watergate days, was known as a non-denial denial.
3. When it comes to "Draft Al" websites, say, with the precision and clarity which has made us adore you over the years:
"As the inventor of the Internet, I know that a person can run any website he or she may desire so long as there is no controlling legal authority preventing it."
3 Comments:
"although it is reasonable to suspect Bill Clinton misunderstands the spelling of that particular award."
If the piece that Bill got had been truly noble, she would have kept her mouth shut...
Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.
In an interview on CNN in 1999, Gore, who was then the sitting vice president and a candidate to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House, said this by way of reviewing his record:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
Notice that Gore took credit for leadership in Congress in creating the Internet. He never said he "invented" the Internet. Was his claim to such leadership legitimate? Well, here's what Republican Newt Ginrich said about that:
"(I)n all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is—and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a 'futures group'—the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the ’80s began to actually happen."
Way back in 1988, The Guardian, a British paper, reported this:
"American computing scientists are campaigning for the creation of a 'superhighway' which would revolutionise data transmission. Legislation has already been laid before Congress by Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, calling for government funds to help establish the new network, which scientists say they can have working within five years, at a cost of Dollars 400 million."
Years later, when Gore was vice president, computer scientist Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet, had this to say:
“I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president."
History shows that Gore's claim to leadership in congressional action regarding the Internet was ignored by the media and not distorted into a claim that he invented the Net until the Republican Party cooked up that falsehood a few days later.
The correct spelling of Al's last name, if I remember correctly, is Gourd.
Post a Comment
<< Home