BECAUSE I SAID SO

If you're a full-grown straight man and you watched the Academy Awards on Sunday, shame on you. Turn in your card; you're out of the club.

I'm a full-grown straight man (as far as anyone can prove), and I did not watch the Academy Awards, but I have a confession to make: I kept it on in the background. Ordinarily, such an admission would embarrass me so badly that I wouldn't be able to look Forest Whitaker in the eye, but I'm not embarrassed because I have an excuse. You see, I was occupied on Sunday night with the manly pastime of online gaming, and I only kept the television tuned to the Academy Awards so that I could hear what Al Gore had to say.

I'm confident in my manhood, so much so that I'm not at all uncomfortable admitting that I was touched when Alan Arkin cried or that I find Leonardo DiCaprio almost pretty enough to-. Well, anyway, I was virtually obliterating strange lands in World of Warcraft with my Level 61 Tauren warrior (his name is Theodoric) when I had to tell my guild mates “brb-phone.” Of course, my phone wasn't actually ringing. Nobody ever calls me. What was actually happening was the former vice president and elected president of the United States of America was talking to an audience of a billion people, and for a second I thought we might be about to hear something I've wanted to hear for months. He was teasing. I went back to killing trolls.

I don't believe President Gore intends to run for his rightful office in 2008. If he did, he probably would have said so by now. But I sure hope I'm wrong. I wish with all my heart that the man most clearly deserving to be the most powerful man in our country would quit making films and speeches and use what's left of his productive mid-life to help us all out of the testicular gridlock in which we find ourselves due to our current emperor's penchant for jumping into biggest-willy contests without first checking to see if his own package is shrunk up from the cold.

Please Al, please-run already. Don't leave us twisting in the wind, and don't leave it up to Hillary or Barack to save us. They can't do it. You can.

Don't all the rest of you start sending e-mails to my editor without thinking this through. Hillary Clinton is probably capable of being our chief executive. She's smart, qualified and has put in enough time, and she's fairly well-respected around the world. However, she's also fairly likely to polarize voters. We can't afford that. Likewise, Barack Obama is smart. He might even be qualified, although there's no way of knowing that because he hasn't put in enough time. And even though he would probably be well-respected around the world, he will almost certainly polarize voters and, once again, we can't afford that.

We all need to remember that the Miracle of 2006 happened scarcely three months ago. Winning control of Capitol Hill is just half the battle. The Democrats need to get the White House to go with it and they need a full eight years of hegemony to undo the devastation wrought by our government since we stood idly by and let that charlatan ride into office on the backs of disenfranchised Floridians. Al Gore can do that. We know he can.

Now, I'm not saying Hillary can't win. Maybe she can. I'm not saying Barack can't win. Maybe he can. Who knows? But I do know for a fact that Al Gore can win because, by god, he did. He won before he was an Academy Award winner, before he was considered for a Nobel Peace Prize and before we knew he was absolutely right about the destruction of our biosphere, the war in Iraq and everything else that we know in retrospect he was absolutely right about. He still can't dance worth a damn, but I'm ready to say he invented the Internet, probably cell phones, too. Whatever.

Imagine, if you will, how nice it would be if a major political party could, for once, get its shit straight. Imagine if right now, in February 2007, the Democratic Party would go ahead and say that it's going to nominate the man who won the presidency for them in 2000. Imagine if he asked Hillary Clinton to join his ticket as his running mate. Imagine if Al indicated that he would tap Barack Obama to be his secretary of state and Wesley Clark to be his secretary of defense. If those folks would get together now with the backing of the party and avoid all the daggers that come out during a normal primary season, they could start running a shadow government nearly two years ahead of schedule. By the time they sauntered into the West Wing in January 2009, they'd have everything fixed.

I'm thinking that if they did that, Al might even be good enough to ask his former boss, Bill, to take a break from running around with W's daddy and sign on for a two-year stint to try to do something about either the Israeli-Palestinian mess or that nagging little problem in Darfur or the trouble with Kim Jong-il or the global crisis surrounding Dannielynn Smith's paternity. Bill's a good guy. He'd do it if Al asked him to.

I know, I know. Don't bother telling me. It ain't gonna happen. In the world of politics, there's as much chance of something sensible occurring as there is that I'll shoot a falcon out of my butt. That's why I try to avoid the world of politics as much as possible. I just wish Al wouldn't avoid it so much. He's got a job to do. I can screw around in the World of Warcraft (where I probably can shoot a falcon out of my butt), but Al belongs in the real world.