Other Columns by Oliver North
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Pity the poor Democrats. Five years of George W. Bush in office have driven them to distraction. Their most audible advocates have developed "Mad Mule Malady." The symptoms are identical to "Foot-in-Mouth Disease," and those running for office under the Democrat Party banner this year are likely to find their colleagues' increasingly vicious verbal gaffes to be both memorable and damaging.

The onset of their illness could not be more instructive. As leading Democrats are attacking Republicans, al Qaeda is planning to attack America. That is what we are told by Osama bin Laden, who, in an audio tape in which contents are being confirmed, threatens new terrorist attacks against the United States and our citizens. And once again, in the most important issue of our time -- the defeat of radical Islamic jihadists -- Democrats are proving themselves irrelevant.

This week, Hizzoner Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, used a Martin Luther King Day celebration to urge that the Big Easy be re-built as a "Chocolate City." Not to be outdone by a mere mayor's blatant racism, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., chose an MLK-Day event sponsored by the Reverend Al Sharpton to liken the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives to a "plantation." Her foray into race baiting followed the outburst of her friend and aging entertainer Harry Belafonte who, on a recent visit to Venezuela, described President Bush as "the world's greatest terrorist."

These strange statements might have topped the week were it not for former Vice President Al Gore, who used a speech in Washington to declare that President Bush has placed "our Constitution ... at risk," by directing the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor communications between suspected terrorist operatives in the United States and individuals overseas.

Gore, in a lengthy speech to the "trans-partisan" Liberty Coalition on MLK Day, told the audience that President Bush was engaging in "a gross and excessive power grab" and "has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently." The former vice president, apparently forgetting the record of his own running-mate, added that, "A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government." And just to make sure that everyone got the point, he claimed that, "The disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution."

Forget for a moment that the person making these charges once claimed to have invented the Internet. Disregard his 1997 assertion that he and his wife, Tipper, were models for the main characters in Erich Segal's 1970 romance novel "Love Story" -- a claim Segal later discounted. Set aside that Gore told a Teamster's conference in Sept. 2000 that among "the lullabies I heard as child," was one with the words, "Look for the union label" -- even though the lyrics weren't written until 1975, for an International Ladies Garment Workers Union ad campaign -- when Gore was 27. Ignore Gore's March 3, 1997 artful denial that calls to contributors from his government office violated federal campaign rules when he declared that, "There is no controlling legal authority that says this was in violation of law."

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