Once Upon a TimeThere was a girl named Phoenix Woman who imagined that everything would be right in the world if only the Democrats won every election. But jealous forces have conspired to keep Phoenix Woman from her dream world, and
she was very unhappy. And so she retreated into her own world, where Al Gore had won in 2000.
May 5, 2001: National Security chief Sandy Berger, at the urging of his staffers John O'Neill and Richard Clarke, presents President Gore with a PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) warning of imminent plans by bin Laden to attack New York, America's financial center, with hijacked commercial jets used as flying bombs. The suspicion is that Al-Qaeda will try to succeed where they had failed eight years earlier and attack the World Trade Center. Gore consults with former Senators Gary Hart (D-CO) and Warren Rudman (R-NH), who chaired a terrorism commission formed by President Clinton in the late 1990s; they concur with the PDB's findings.
May 6, 2001: In response to the May 5 PDB, Gore orders the FAA to implement the proposals made by his 1996 commission on airport security, but which the Democratic party had backed away from after the airlines had protested. Northwest and Delta Airlines further weaken their precarious financial states by buying millions of dollars of radio ads depicting the new procedures as wasteful and costly to the air traveler. Gore, per O'Neill's and Clarke's recommendations, also orders the FAA to watch for Middle Eastern students at flight schools who are interested only in steering planes, not in performing takeoffs or landings. On his syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh proclaims that "Crazy Al Gore is out to kill off the airline industry!"
June 1, 2001: Republican Senators James Jeffords and Lincoln Chaffee, disgusted with the demagoguery of the GOP, switch parties and become Independents who inhabit the Democratic Senate Caucus. This throws control of the Senate into Democratic hands.
June 5, 2001: Jobless numbers for the month of April fall by 300,000, continuing a strong pattern of job growth that Gore inherited from Clinton. New numbers from the Office of Management and Budget indicate that Gore's fiscal policies are paying down the Federal debt faster than predicted. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, noting that the soft economic landing of 1999 and 2000 had been followed by the dramatic rise of the stock market in the first months of the Gore term, warns yet again to beware of "irrational exuberance".
It gets every more pathetic, with Al Gore saving New Orleans from Katrina, and even nominating a hack prosecutor named Ronnie Earle to the Supreme Court. Just a hideous batch of nonsense. I'd call it a masturbation fantasy, but most masturbation fantasies have more resemblance to reality.
Labels: Al Gore, Firedog Lake
