"I am Al Gore and I used to be the next president of the United States of America." One gathers that this remark by former US vice president Al Gore has become his opening line everywhere he speaks, and he brings down the house when he pokes fun at himself.
In the US presidential election of 2000, Gore, who represented the Democratic Party, garnered more popular votes than Republican candidate George W. Bush, but eventually lost the election to Bush, who won the electoral college by a razor-thin margin.
If Gore had filed an appeal against the outcome of the election, he might have had a chance to turn the tables on Bush, but he chose not to, because he did not want to see a split nation. In the end, Gore conceded defeat because he looked to the overall picture instead of individual and partisan interests, thereby clearing the way for a Bush presidency. Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry made the same decision when faced with the disputed outcome of the 2004 election.
Unlike other former presidents or vice presidents, Gore has refrained from rushing to write a book about his years in the White House. Nor did he attempt to make money by giving speeches everywhere. After he was defeated in 2000, Gore taught in a number of universities in the US, wrote two books with his wife and launched a cable-TV station for young people. When New Orleans was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, Gore and Paramount Pictures produced a documentary entitled An Inconvenient Truth, which later received much attention at the Cannes Film Festival.
Bush, who opposed the Kyoto Protocol, finally pledged that the US would make an effort to fight global climate change. Satellite images reveal, however, that the hole in the ozone layer over the Ant-arctic has now reached the size of North America. The dangers posed by global climate change and the hole in the ozone layer is not a problem for future generations, but for those of us living today.
Gore may have lost the election, but today he is more respected than Bush. He has appeared on the covers of such magazines as Vanity Fair, Wired and the liberal-leaning American Prospect, and has been selected as one of Time magazine's "100 people who shape our world." Even though the Democrats urged him to run in the 2004 election because of his prestige, he declined, saying that there are many ways to serve one's country and community that do not involve becoming an official.
If Gore were in Taiwan, he would certainly be seen as crazy. Because this country doesn't have a pluralistic value system, most people are only interested in a single value: politics. Successful business magnates and Nobel Prize-winning academics alike are all drawn into the political turmoil, expending all of society's energy in the strife. The recent anti-corruption campaign originally had a chance of becoming a civic movement for social reform, but politicians degraded it into a partisan squabble by focusing it into an attack on President Chen Shui-bian (
Many Taiwanese politicians treat politics as a profession instead of a form of service. They remain under the illusion that leaving politics symbolizes failure, so they chase after any "employment opportunities" that will earn them power. Some people repeatedly campaign to ascend from the vice presidency to the presidency. Some who have failed to be elected president then campaign for the vice presidency, trying each lower rung of the ladder until they're reduced to scrambling for a mayoral bid. These are the kind of opportunists who degrade Taiwanese politics for their personal ambitions.
Gore exemplifies the ideal that politics is a form of volunteerism to serve greater society, and that power is a means to reach that goal, not the end. He is an example that Taiwanese society and politicians would do well to learn from.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under