Here is an excerpt from Al Gore’s Inaugural Address: January 20, 2009:

"....I have stood by in recent decades watching the unraveling of something beautiful, destroyed by the worst amongst us, acting for the basest of motives. America was never a perfect country, but we were a global model for many of our achievements, and we should have been, for we had truly achieved much. It was therefore with surprise and grief that I watched as we turned our forward motion into a backward regression, and one which went further than imaginable. At first I thought that the effort, awful as that was, was only to unravel the last decades of our national history, destroying the social safety net, the civil rights, women’s rights, environmental consciousness and labor peace we had built at such great cost and struggle. But then I saw that it went further, and there has also been a destruction of the principles of good governance we adopted a hundred years ago, returning our country to the cronyism and incompetence and government-for-hire of the nineteenth century. As time went on it was clear that the regression went even further back still, deeply assaulting the very notions of constitutional government, democracy and separation of church and state, and thus casting us back into the Dark Ages of monarchy, superstition and religious wars which our Founders so bravely fought to replace with something so much better. But even a regression of centuries does not do justice to the damage that has been done. As elemental foundations of Western Civilization such as the right to habeas corpus and limited governmental power have been unceremoniously shredded these last years, I have watched as we have stepped even further back in time, into the gray mists of eleventh century feudal England. Astonishingly, we have traveled backwards as a society this last generation, not just years or decades, and not even centuries, but rather a full millennium. "So many people have given so much - often including their lives - so that these liberties and achievements of a thousand years could be realized for the benefit of all of us. It is shameful enough that we have not sacrificed of ourselves to add to this exalted list. But it is infinitely worse still that we have unraveled the gifts given to us as such expense, foolishly neglecting their value. Let there be no mistake: An America with eleventh century values will not last long in the twenty-first century. History has been passing this great nation rapidly by these last decades, not least because of the speed at which we’ve been traveling in the other direction. I have many interests and passions as a person and as a president, but I can assure you that national suicide is not one of them. If there was a way that I could, I would say thank you today to every person who has ever sacrificed to make the lives of today’s generation safer, easier, happier and better. I cannot, but what I can do instead is to honor those contributions by leading this country in their preservation and their enhancement, adding our share to these great works for the benefit of those who come after us. The least we can do to preserve our great fortune as the inheritors of Magna Carta, the Constitution, the New Deal and more is to keep them intact. If we’re better than just that, we will also seek to deserve that good fortune as well, by adding our own contributions, borne of our own sacrifices...."