Former Vice President Al Gore Speak to the Saudis

Ronald Reagan in 1994 was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He wrote a letter addressing the nation for the last time before spending the rest of his life in peace away from the attention and cameras knowing full well that his mind would be deteriorating.

If only Al Gore would have been so graceful.

Today, he's addressing the Saudis:

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.

Gore said Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in "unforgivable" conditions. The former vice president said the Bush administration was playing into al-Qaida's hands by routinely blocking Saudi visa applications.

"The thoughtless way in which visas are now handled, that is a mistake," Gore said during the Jiddah Economic Forum. "The worst thing we can possibly do is to cut off the channels of friendship and mutual understanding between Saudi Arabia and the United States."

Gore told the largely Saudi audience, many of them educated at U.S. universities, that Arabs in the United States had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."

"Unfortunately there have been terrible abuses and it's wrong," Gore said. "I do want you to know that it does not represent the desires or wishes or feelings of the majority of the citizens of my country."

The article, who tries to establish the credibility of the Saudi audience by stating that many were Western educated, passes on the fact that our mostly Saudi friends that flew airplanes into our buildings on September 11th were also educated here. And last that I checked, "indiscriminate round-ups" in "unforgivable" conditions is definitely something "the majority of the citizens in (our) country" do no support, but what is Al talking about here? I'm under the impression that he is trying to insinuate to a foreign audience that we've re-opened the internment camps and are throwing a bunch of brown people into them under the Bushitler regime.

Is there something I'm not privy to that isn't sourced from Indymedia?

Is he talking about Guantanamo?

What the duce is this former Vice President talking about?

Oh well, it's not like he threw the country into a Constitutional crisis for personal gain again. Maybe I was foolish in my youth, but didn't we once know a sane Al Gore? Was this the same guy that utterly embarrassed Ross Perot in arguing for a highly logical and bi-partisan free-trade agreement?