More Gore Noises!! Hoorah.....

We can only hope!

Until then, my heart belongs to Edwards.

Washington diary: Al Gore running
By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington

So is Al Gore running?

The answer was not just a resounding yes. It was delivered breathlessly, impatiently, punctuated by huffs and puffs. There were neatly formed beads of sweat running down his cheeks.

Al Gore has become a principal spokesman on global warming

Al was definitely running. No doubt about it! Proof positive. He was running on the running machine at a hotel in Los Angeles where I also happened to be staying.

While I was ploughing gently and unambitiously through the waters of the nearby pool I spotted him in the gym. He was reading the local paper while working the Stairmaster/running machine for at least an hour. I could practically see the pounds flying off him.

The punditocracy has already decreed that one sure sign of Al Gore entering the 2008 presidential race is any evidence that he's serious about shedding post-Florida recount pounds.

There you have it. A scoop!

Who knows what's really going through his mind?

But I have no doubt that if he did decide to enter in October this year he would have no shortage of funds, would need less cash than his opponents because of his name recognition and would hugely benefit from the signature issue of global warming for which he has become America's principal spokesman.

Grumpy old man?

Someone who is undoubtedly running for the White House announced his candidacy yesterday. John McCain finally made official what he had already been pursuing relentlessly for months.

Yet his stance on the Iraq war, which has caused him so much grief, is utterly principled

The Straight Talk Express, his campaign bus, limped into Portsmouth, New Hampshire. But it offered less straight talk and looked a lot less like an express than it did seven years ago, when

McCain gave George W Bush a run for his money.

Perhaps it is the extra seven years, perhaps the agonies of justifying the Iraq war, but the senator from Arizona looks more and more like a grumpy old man.

He is two years older than Ronald Reagan was at this stage of the campaign but appears far more aged. His voice sounds tired and croaky.

And yet his stance on the Iraq war, which has caused him so much grief, is utterly principled.

John McCain believes that the Iraq War can still be won

McCain genuinely believes that the war can still be won, that drawing down would be disastrous and that the de facto civil war will spill over into the region with horrendous consequences.
He believes this with the grim determination of a lonely soldier standing in the muddy trench of his conviction. And if the man could deal with five years in solitary confinement in Vietnam's Hanoi Hilton prison camp, he can certainly hold out against the slings and arrows of outrageous pollsters.

But the campaign trail has its own form of torture and, despite his undoubted wisdom and experience, the senator is dwarfed by the younger, more vibrant candidates, capturing the imagination of a nation yearning, as ever, for something new.

I asked McCain the other day whether he would be twice defeated by Bush, once in 2000 when he opposed him on the campaign trail and once in 2008 when he'll be punished for supporting his surge in Iraq. McCain laughed and said, once again, he would rather lose a campaign than lose a war.

Defending America

I have been invited by the debating society of my old university, the Oxford Union, to speak on the following motion: "This House regrets the founding of the United States!"

When I first read the motion on my Blackberry, being short-sighted, I thought it was a joke and then a misprint. Then I read with relief that I had been invited to speak against the motion and defend the existence of the country I currently call home.

In recent weeks I have put the motion to various friends and acquaintances in America. The reaction has been mixed.

The ageing hippie in Utah grinned, looked heavenward and said: "Finally someone has seen the light!" The student from Montana blushed and almost cried.

Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's former national security adviser, went ashen-faced, shook his head and said: "If it hadn't been for us there would BE no modern Europe and your debate would probably be conducted in German!" Touche.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.