Al Gore

Two contrasting stories on CBS' 60 Minutes illustrated for the hundredth time why selecting the right person for President matters. In 2000, the American people made the right choice in voting for Al Gore over George Bush, but five conservative justices of the Supreme Court overruled the people and instead installed perhaps the most lawless regime in American history. We have paid a huge price for the Court's lawless dishonesty.

The imprisonment and torture of innocent people. President Bush surrounded himself with men and women who have little respect for the rule of law but plenty of zeal for giving the executive branch expanded powers unchecked by the Constitution. The created a Justice Department without integrity that sanctioned massive warrantless spying on Americans, kidnapping, rendition, secret prisons, indefinite imprisonment, the suspension of habeas corpus, kangaroo trials and torture. And the Administration is still lying about it all.

From 60 Minutes' story of the innocent German man we kidnapped, tortured and held for years at Guantanamo long after authorities knew he was completely innocent:

CBS) At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

The story Kurnaz told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is a rare look inside that clandestine system of justice, where the government's own secret files reveal that an innocent man lost his liberty, his dignity, his identity, and ultimately five years of his life.

. . .

"Have you ever in your legal career run across anything like this?" Pelley asks [detainee counsel] Baher Azmy.

"In my legal career, no," Azmy says. "But in Guantanamo, no detainee has ever been able to genuinely present evidence before a neutral judge. And so as absurd as Murat Kurnaz's case is, I assure you there are many, many dozens just as tenuous."

The campaign to save the planet. Had we had an honest Supreme Court, we would have had a very different man as President. However he might have responded to 9/11, it is certain Al Gore would never have invaded Iraq and equally certain he would never have destroyed the Constitution's Bill of Rights through illegal spying on Americans, nor would he have trampled on statutes and treaties outlawing abuse of prisoners and torture for the sake of a mindless "global war on terror." But our nation would have been leading a global effort to deal with the threat of climate change.

From 60 Minutes' interview with Al Gore:

When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he was often ridiculed as inauthentic and wooden. Today he is passionate and animated, a man transformed. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar, and last year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Now he's a certified celebrity, the popular prophet of global warming, and has helped change the way the country thinks about the issue.

And yet while 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is a big problem, they still rank it near the very bottom of their list of top 25 concerns.

And so Al Gore is about to wage a new campaign to emphasize the urgency of what he says is the greatest challenge facing our time.

It also matters whom we select as Vice President. When Lesley Stahl noted that Dick Cheney dismisses the validity of global warming, Gore observed,

"I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view. They’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the earth is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off."

In his next speech, George Bush will tell us again why we have to spy on Americans, or occupy Iraq indefinitely. Nobel Laureate and Oscar winner Al Gore will soon launch a $300 million advertising campaign to convince the world we need to act on global warming.

Update: Nicholas Kristof's op ed captures the point well.