The Presidency of Al Gore, 2001-2009

[lildreamer316]

(Note: Continually thinking about how disastrous the last seven years have been, I did some imagining and research on what the world would be like if Al Gore had become president in 2001. Such a process is really about how important it is to elect the right president. I asked friends and acquaintances for their ideas, I read books by and about Gore, and I watched again his September 2000 interview with Oprah Winfrey, where I learned about his favorite book and movie and his art teacher. Here are some of my findings.)

The Presidency of Al Gore, 2001-2009

On January 20, 2001, Al Gore, the candidate who won the most votes, becomes the 43rd president of the United States.

President Gore follows up on the many urgent warnings from the intelligence agencies that Osama Bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States. The 9/11 planners are caught, and their plots are aborted.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban warns that it will destroy the two giant 1,500-year-old statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Much of the world sees these serene figures as symbols of wisdom beyond time, but they offend conservative Muslims. Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke talks with the Pakistani foreign minister, who reminds him that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and suggests that if aid to the poor there is increased, the Buddhas will be spared. Gore calls the American Buddhist actor Richard Gere, who immediately raises $50 million for the Afghani poor, and the Gore administration promises $5 billion in direct aid over the next five years. The Taliban agrees to preserve the statues.

Gore's favorite film, Local Hero, the Scots eco-comedy, becomes a best-selling DVD. The film is about how ancient values of subsistence, closeness to nature, and community defeat the rapacious forces of the oil industry. People like quoting the old Scot who puts the kibosh on the oilmen: "The business left, but the beach is still here."

Republicans are squawking that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a threat to the safety of the country, that he has weapons of mass destruction. Gore asks the United Nations to send its weapons inspectors back into Iraq, and after six months of searching, they find none. Saddam is in what Eliot Weinberger calls "the 'autumn of the patriarch' mode: holed up in his palaces writing his trashy novels, and oblivious to the details of government." Gore brokers a deal in which Saddam's novels are translated into English and published and he agrees to slowly loosen up some of the restrictions on the Kurds and Shias and bring them into the government.

In 1998, as vice president, Gore proposed a NASA satellite, Triana, to provide, from a distance of 930,000 miles, a continuous view of the sunlit side of the earth. Triana would measure global warming by measuring how much sunlight is reflected and emitted from the earth and would monitor weather systems. Triana is built and launched in February 2003. In late 2004, it sends back images of the beginnings of a great tsunami that might have killed hundreds of thousands if it had gone undetected in its early stages. But Triana's continual data feed allows people to be warned to flee to higher ground, and only a few dozen perish.


...MORE!!...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-macafee/the-presidency-of-al-gore_b_101200.html

GD Thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3271922

[Uncle Joe]

1. Thanks for the thread, lildreamer.

:thumbsup: