According to Dick Morris, former Vice President and lunatic-for-hire Al Gore may have enough momentum to steal the nomination away from Hillary Clinton in 2008. Morris postulates that Gore has picked up enough credibility on the Left that he can make himself the frontrunner by just entering the race:

The former vice president’s slashing attacks on the administration and his stalwart, if misguided, opposition to the Iraq war leave him without the complications and complexes that will devil Clinton as she seeks to appeal to the unforgiving left of the Democratic Party.

And Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book Earth in the Balance. He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug — Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.

The Democratic base’s anger at Gore’s defeat in 2000 was assuaged by the worse Kerry defeat of 2004. The idea that he was an incompetent candidate has been replaced in Democratic iconography by the idea that he was cheated out of the presidency. The hiatus has healed his reputation with the base in much the same way that the negative rap on Nixon for losing in 1960 was ameliorated by the Goldwater wipeout of 1964.

All Karl Rove must be thinking after reading this is: God, please make it so!

If Morris is right -- and Morris usually provides accurate analysis -- it only shows how radical and out of touch the Democratic Party has become. If their base prefers a bitter old man that panders to radical Islamist propaganda while we are at war against Islamofascist terrorism, then the Democrats had better consider jettisoning their base and starting fresh. No one in their right mind would nominate Al Gore for President after that speech in Saudi Arabia, and if that's what gets the leftist base involved, the Democrats will be better off in the long run without them.

Morris, the ultimate Machiavellian, notes that some would question Gore's loyalty for challenging the wife of the man who made him Vice President. He dryly quotes Truman's advice to "get a dog" if one wants a friend in Washington, but he fails to mention the stab in the back he delivered to Joe Lieberman in 2004. Lieberman refused to announce his entry into the primaries in case Gore decided to run against George Bush again, but Gore waited far too long to announce his abstention. Having handicapped his former running mate with an impossibly late start -- all the major donors had divided themselves between Dean, Kerry, and others -- Gore then made the surprise endorsement of Howard Dean instead of Lieberman, without even warning his old partner.

Gore? Loyalty? Since when?

Republicans should be delighted with this turn of events. Gore narrowly lost when running as a centrist. Just wait to see what happens when he tries running again after five years of paranoid-conspiracy theories flying out of his mouth. There won't be enough air time in the world to broadcast the commercials that the GOP would produce.

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