Too little, too late? At last, the Democrats mount their first serious critique of the Bush Administration since the September 11th attacks more than a year ago, but with the dogs of war now all but loosed upon Iraq, it's hard to tell if anyone will be able to deter Dubya and Co. from their splendid little adventure in the Middle East. Having had their bluff called on the issue of weapons inspections, which are now set to resume, the hawks are now reverting to Plan B, which is to denounce any concession Saddam Hussein makes to the U.N. as a "ploy", and call for his out-and-out removal, regardless of international law. By now it should be clear to everyone that the present administration will say or do anything in order to get this war underway, just as it was willing to win the 2000 Presidential Election at any cost. Al Gore came face to face with that evil resolve two Decembers ago, only to shrink away from it then, perhaps more out of surprise than anything else that the conservatives would trample their own core values (i.e., States' rights and the need to minimize the reach of the Federal government) and who knows what else in order to wrest the White House away from the Democrats. But this time he knows better, and by speaking out against the so-called "War on Terror" in a California press conference earlier this month, he finally opened the floodgates of doubt and dissent, and regardless of whether you're a conservative or a liberal or something in between, you should thank Mr. Gore for doing so. Contrary to what Ari Fleischer and the conservative talking heads say, it is patriotic to question our leaders, even in a time of war. Heck, especially in a time of war. Pundits may blast Al Gore's speech as no more than political grandstanding for the 2004 Election, but the fact of the matter is that for an entire year the business of politics (and I don't use the word here in a pejorative sense, because politics are the lifeblood of a democracy) had ground to a halt, as the Bush Administration wrapped itself in the tattered World Trade Center flag whenever any of its policies - foreign or domestic, military or economic - were questioned. Only a person with nothing to lose this November could break the jingoistic spell that had fallen over Washington, and only Mr. Gore had the national profile to level such accusations as he did and not be immediately dismissed as a crank. Al Gore is a patriot, in the truest sense of the word. Let's just hope that his shot of courage is enough at this point to pull America back from the brink of insanity.