Yesterday, I eagerly scoured the front section of The Salt Lake Tribune for a wire story about Gore's speech on Monday. Unfortunately, it wasn't there, not on the front page nor buried within the inside pages. I started composing a letter to the editor expressing my disgust with their failure to run the story.
Luckily, I never got it finished and e-mailed. For today, when I opened the paper to the editorial section was Rule Of Law staring me in the face. The subtitle is Al Gore's Speech.
Details below the fold.
They start off by poking gentle fun at Gore and then roar to full throttle, sort of like Gore did in the speech:
"...the former vice president indicted George W. Bush for arrogating to himself powers that the Constitution does not confer on him or any other president."
No backing off from what Gore was saying:
"We believe that Gore is right, both in his analysis and in his proposed remedies. We second his call for a special counsel to investigate his claim - an absurd claim, in our view - that Congress' authorization of the use of military force in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 gave the president the inherent power to violate the Bill of Rights and the FISA statute."
They pointedly do not question either Gore's patriotism or his abilities to understand the international situation:
"Like Gore, we do not for a moment discount the threat that radical Islamist terrorism poses to this nation..."
And finally, they give the readers some responsibility:
"But judge for yourself. Look up his speech at http://www.acsblog .org and read it. We do not believe he exaggerates."
I highly recommend reading the whole editorial. As a bonus you can see Pat Bagley's complementary editorial cartoon.
Also send kudos to the Trib editorial staff as I am sure they will be hit with a lot of backlash here in Utah.