Imagine . . .

IMAGINE . . . How different America and the world would be if Al Gore’s victory in 2000 had not been hijacked, if he had become President of the United States instead of George W. Bush:

– What if the warnings of Richard Clarke and the CIA had been heeded by a president who was not obsessed with banning stem cell research and clearing brush on his ranch, so that the 9/11 attacks might have been prevented?
– What if we had not launched an unprovoked, incompetently-executed “crusade” as we did by invading and occupying Iraq?
– What if we had retained the respect and cooperation of our allies and the world community rather than alienating them by precipitously withdrawing from the Kyoto Accords, imposing an arrogant John Bolton on the United Nations, and ignoring world opinion and UN resolutions to initiate a war of aggression against Iraq?
– What if we had already started combating global warming in order to avert a cataclysmic climate crisis and preserving and protecting the planetary environment rather than putting greedy oil companies in charge of our energy and environmental policies?
– What if we had continued to generate budget surpluses and paying down the national debt, rather than amassing huge deficits in order to subsidize billionaires and pay for an unnecessary war in Iraq?
– What if we had continued to pursue Al Qaeda and the Taliban and captured Bin Laden, al Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar, instead of redirecting our resources toward Iraq, a country that not attacked us and that was completely contained by post-Gulf War sanctions and no-fly zones?
– What if our president had been committed to protecting and expanding our civil rights rather than attacking the Bill of Rights, supporting torture, abolishing the writ of habeas corpus, and creating a Gulag in Guantanamo, Egypt, and Eastern Europe?
– What if we had been encouraging and funding stem cell research rather than pandering to the radical religious right and the politics of ignorance?

IMAGINE where we will be in ten years if we elect Al Gore president in 2008?

Copyright 2007. Ben D. Cooper