Finally, the loyal opposition finds its voice in America. After biting their tongues in the wake of a bogus Presidential election, then walking on eggshells for a full year after the September 11th attacks, the Democrats are at last speaking out about the state of the nation and our ever-more-misguided "War on Terror", which has all but launched an unprovoked, unjustified war on Saddam Hussein. Senator Tom Daschle angrily excoriated the Bush Administration yesterday for implicitly questioning the Democrat-controlled Senate's loyalty after failing to pass a fatally-compromised bill on Homeland Security that, among other things, would have (in the name of "fighting terra", as Dubya so eloquently puts it) turned fifty thousand veteran unionized federal workers into unprotected scabs with its passage. The crew in the White House has been pulling this act pretty consistently since 9/11, turning every political disagreement on how best to proceed in safeguarding our country into a patriotic litmus test, and up until this week the strategy has worked like a charm. Enter Al Gore. You can love or hate the man (personally, I'm of the growing opinion that - as the Daily Howler has insisted all along - he was screwed out of being taken seriously as a candidate by the media, whose surprisingly vicious ad hominem bias against Gore continues to this day), but the fact of the matter is that by lashing out at the administration's Iraqi war schemes as a calculated distraction from the real issues facing America, the winner of the popular vote in Election 2000 managed to light a fire underneath his hitherto-spineless officeholding political brethren, and now there's at least a chance that we'll have a real, honest-to-goodness debate about the future of our country before we let Bush and Company flush it down the toilet for no good reason. So thanks, Al! The nation owes you a huge debt of gratitude, whether we realize it or not.