[Preechr]

Gore Says Bush Governs from 'Love of Power'

Mon Oct 18, 3:50 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush governs from a "love of power" and right-wing ideology rather than religious beliefs, and he has yet to hold anyone in his administration accountable for mistakes, former Vice President Al Gore said on Monday.


As the campaign by Bush and Democrat John Kerry for president headed into the last stretch before the Nov. 2 election, Gore criticized his rival for the White House four years ago on Iraq and other issues.


"I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible," Gore said in a speech at Georgetown University.


"It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency," he said.


He painted the Bush administration and its "right-wing" supporters as pursuing policies for the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest of the country.


"The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans ... who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world," Gore said.


"And in the process, he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities," he said.


"Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged," he said.


Gore also criticized Bush for not holding anyone in his administration accountable for problems.


He said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had not been held accountable for "the most shameful and humiliating violation of American principles in recent memory" in the interrogations of prisoners in Iraq.




Then, he made devil horns with his fingers and flicked his tongue while prancing around the stage for 30 minutes screaming unintelligible curses.