Mercury Rising

GQ has a nice interview with Our Rightful President that's been online for about a week and already cited by several bloggers of note. Here's one of the many quotable quotes from it:

I have a battery-powered hubris alarm on my belt. And it’s set on vibrate, and it’s going crazy.

And here's another:

I actually just performed a voice-over role in a movie last week. I am reprising my role as a disembodied head in Futurama, which is being made into a movie. There are a significant number of people who appear not to know or care that I was Vice President of the United States, but who are very tuned into the fact that I uttered the immortal line, “I have ridden the mighty moonworm.”

And the GOP/Media Complex thought BUSH was the guy they'd rather have a beer with?! What a bunch of paid-off dorks. But he's also dead serious, too. Here's the section that Atrios focused on last week, on whether Gore would have heeded the many warnings from the CIA and others prior to 9/11:

And it’s almost too easy to say, “I would have heeded the warnings.” In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, “Well, you’ve covered your ass.” And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. [PW butts in: Gore's referring to the infamous event that took place in August of 2001, when the CIA actually sent agents down to Crawford, Texas, to warn Bush in person about the Al-Qaeda threat, and he blew them off with the infamous phrase "All right, you've covered your ass now."] And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job. And now the Woodward book has this episode that has been confirmed by the record that George Tenet, who was much abused by this administration, went over to the White House for the purpose of calling an emergency meeting and warning as clearly as possible about the extremely dangerous situation with Osama bin Laden, and was brushed off! And I don’t know why—honestly—I mean, I understand how horrible this Congressman Foley situation with the instant messaging is, okay? I understand that. But, why didn’t these kinds of things produce a similar outrage? And you know, I’m even reluctant to talk about it in these terms because it’s so easy for people to hear this or read this as sort of cheap political game-playing. I understand how it could sound that way. [Practically screaming now] But dammit, whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure? This administration has been by far the most incompetent, inept, and with more moral cowardice, and obsequiousness to their wealthy contributors, and obliviousness to the public interest of any administration in modern history, and probably in the entire history of the country!

And then there's this:

You know my all time favorite Onion headline—you read The Onion?—sometime in the summer of 2001, the lead story on the front page had a picture of Tipper and me, and the headline was, “Gores Enjoying Best Sex of Their Lives.” And she said, “How did they know?”

When I think of how the last six years could have gone... sigh.