Al Gore, that is.

His latest rant is stunning in its chutzpah:

“The claim by Bush and Cheney that the American people must give them four more years in office or else be ‘hit hard’ by another terrorist attack is a sleazy and despicable effort to blackmail voters with fear,” Gore said.

“They are going back to the ugliest page in the Republican playbook: fear,” he said. “They’re not even really trying to convince you to vote for George Bush. Their only hope, they’ve decided, is to try and make you too afraid to vote for John Kerry. It’s the lowest sort of politics imaginable. It is not worthy of a presidential candidate.”

This from a man who, in 1996, bellowed at the nation that if the Evil Republicans retained Congress, that they would poison the air and water, starve schoolchildren, and force old folks to eat kibbles and bits, before throwing them out of their homes. This from a man whose party ran radio ads in St. Louis claiming that “more black churches would burn” in the event of a Republican victory.

This only elicits one more sigh of relief that he didn’t win in 2000.

“The World Wants Kerry.”

For president. That’s what the Beeb says.

It sounds like he’s running for the wrong office. He should be gunning for Kofi’s job. It’s certainly one to which he’s more temperamentally suited.

Like a superball. The poll was taken after the president’s convention speech:

— In New York City, the number of adults who say Bush will win jumped from 39% on 7/22 (the week before the DNC) to 58% today: 19 points up for Bush, 17 points down for Kerry.

— In Los Angeles, the number who say Bush will win jumped from 38% on 7/22 to 59% today: 21 points up for Bush, 18 points down for Kerry.

— In Pittsburgh, Bush went from 44% to 64%: 20 points up for Bush, 19 points down for Kerry.

So much for the conventional wisdom that the electorate was “locked in place” and there were no undecideds, and no room for a bounce (which was the MSM excuse for the fact that Kerry didn’t get one).

There’s no way for the numbers to change this much except for former Kerry voters moving to Bush. I see no sign that Kerry has the ability or strategy to get them back. They say that the voters don’t start paying attention until after Labor Day. It looks like they may have started a few days early this year, and they may have finally started to take a good look at the junior Senator from Massachusetts.

What’s most interesting to me about this poll is the huge number of people who have written Kerry off. If that sentiment holds on election day, and people don’t believe that the election will be close, the wreckage will be even worse, because the Mooreheads will feel free to vote for third-party candidates like Nader or whoever Peace and Freedom puts out there. We may, in fact, have already reached that tipping point, once these polls become widely reported.

Here is his comment on the Republican convention:

Former senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) took the defense a step further by comparing the Republicans’ misleading statements to those of Nazi Germany. “You’ve just got to separate out fact from fiction. . . . Too often, too often, in this country, if you hear something repeated, it’s the old Hitler business — if you hear something repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, you start to believe it,” he said.

Is any other commentary necessary?

Some have pointed out that the recent horrific event in Russia was a combination of September 11th and Columbine. Our current (idiotic, in my opinion) policy is to ban all firearms (and even pictures of firearms, or finger guns) from schools. The effect of course, is to put up a sign on the outside of the school saying, “Welcome terrorists and mass murderers: Building full of unarmed victims.”

Dave Kopel has a more realistic, and sensible solution.

I predict a movement for a Constitutional amendment to allow non-native born to be president, jointly pushed by fans of both Governor Schwartzenegger and Governor Granholm.

Senator Kerry is reportedly “bouncing off the walls” in frustration.

At least it should be. He’s only up by three points in California. And that’s before Ahnuld’s convention speech.

Gore took the state by double digits.

Rich Lowry points out that many people polled want the country to go in a “new direction.” He also points out the vapidity of the assumption of many in the press that such folk, like those who think the country is on the “wrong track” or disapprove of the president’s job, will be Kerry voters. I’ve also pointed this out before.

I disapprove of the president’s performance, on many levels, think the country needs a new direction, and is on the wrong track. Am I going to be voting for Kerry? Of course not, because I’m afraid he’ll derail the train completely.

I was amused yesterday, driving down the coast of Florida, as I listened to Sean Hannity’s “man (and woman) in the street interviews” in which none of the Kerry supporters could identify a single accomplishment in his career, or a single position that he took that they agreed with, that would cause them to vote for him. Many didn’t even know the name of his running mate. It was simply sufficient for him to not be George Bush. If I’d been doing the interviews, I’d have asked how they knew that they wouldn’t be making things worse by electing a guy they admittedly knew absolutely nothing about. But Sean is never quite that quick on the uptake. In any event, one suspects that many of the empty vessels he interviewed won’t bother to vote, despite their stated support for Kerry.

Anyway, this foolish tendency of the media to translate in their minds unhappiness with George Bush into automatic support for Kerry is one of the reasons that they continue to fool themselves about the latter’s prospects in November. I suspect they’re in for a shock.

Richard Holbrooke has a column on Vietnam in yesterday’s WaPo, and how it shaped his (and Kerry’s) generation’s world view. Greg Djerejian has some comments on it (and more importantly, on the potential implications of Kerry’s Senate testimony in 1971–one more reason that he would be a dangerous CinC), but I noticed that he has (at least) one disingenuous sentence in it:

His personal saga embodies the American experience in Vietnam. First he was a good hero in a bad war — a man who volunteered for duty in the Navy and then asked for an assignment on the boats that were to ply the dangerous rivers of Vietnam…

Yes, he volunteered for Swift Boats, and yes, they were (eventually) to ply the dangerous rivers of Vietnam, but my understanding is that at the time he volunteered, he didn’t know that–they were only plying the much less dangerous coastal waters at the time. This is a point that many (all?) Kerry defenders somehow conveniently leave out (just as they ignore the fact that the National Guard in which George Bush enlisted actually was doing duty in Vietnam at the time he signed up).