Former Vice President Al Gore condemned President George W. Bush's handling of domestic and foreign policy Monday at Georgetown University, calling the president "arrogantly out of touch with reality."
It was Gore's last major speech of the campaign season. The Georgetown University Lecture Fund and MoveOn PAC, an anti-Bush 527, sponsored the speech.
Eli Parisier, a founder of MoveOn PAC, introduced Gore, calling him "the most influential vice president to use his powers for good."
Gore said his campaign speeches have focused on trying to understand "what gives Americans an uneasy feeling that something very basic has gone wrong in our democracy."
He said many people feel Bush has "a disdain for facts" and uses faith to manipulate.
"I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible," he said.
Gore was critical of many of the president's policies, but most of his speech was focused on the Iraq war.
He accused the president of purposefully misleading the country into war, saying that at one time 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
"This was not an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence, causing a mistaken linkage between Iraq and al-Qaida," Gore said. "This was something else, a willful choice to make a specific linkage whether evidence existed or not."
Gore said the president is also misrepresenting the current situation in Iraq as successful.
"There is a growing tension between President Bush's portrait of the situation in which we find ourselves and the real facts on the ground," he said.
Gore also accused Bush's administration of failing to read warning signs before Sept. 11. He said the president ignored an Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within U.S."
"From all appearances, he never gave a second thought on that report until he finished reading 'My Pet Goat' on September 11," Gore said.
According to CNN, the Republican National Committee dismissed Gore's speech, saying, "Each time he speaks, Al Gore, like John Kerry, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to protect America's homeland and win the war on terror."
- EMILY CARONE
