America's alpha male stoops to conquer.

Get real Taranto. He's not a sensitive metrosexual type running around helping helpless girls, he was checking her out. BTW, just how callipygian is Miss Abdrabboh?

Mirth in the Balance

Speaking of Al Gore, in a New York Times op-ed piece, Fatina Abdrabboh, a student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, tells a heartwarming story of a random act of kindness.

It begins with Fatina feeling down on America: First, the local yokels in Cambridge looked at her funny because (well, she assumes because) she was wearing a hijab, a Muslim headscarf. As if that weren't bad enough, when she went to the gym, "every television" there "highlighted some aspect of America's conflict with the Muslim world. . . . I was not sure if the blood rushing to my head was caused by the elliptical trainer or by the news coverage."

Boo-hoo-hoo.

She got on a treadmill and started running--hard. Perspiration ensued, and tragedy loomed: "I reached for my towel, accidentally dropping my keys in the process. . . . As they slid down the rolling belt and fell to the carpet, my faith in the United States seemed to fall with them."

Enter our hero:

Suddenly a man, out of breath, but still smiling and friendly, tapped me on my shoulder and said, "Ma'am, here are your keys." It was Al Gore, former vice president of the United States. Mr. Gore had gotten off his machine behind me, picked up my keys, handed them to me and then resumed his workout.

It was nothing more than a kind gesture, but at that moment Mr. Gore's act represented all that I yearned for--acceptance and acknowledgment.
There in front of me, he stood for a part of America that has not made itself well known to 10 million Arab and Muslim-Americans, many of whom are becoming increasingly withdrawn and reclusive because of the everyday hostility they feel.

Now, this may seem like just a feel-good story, but consider how lucky we are that it happened at all. In 2000 Al Gore lost one of the closest presidential elections in recent memory--and he would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the Florida Supreme Court from manufacturing a few hundred more "votes" for him.

Had that happened, it's conceivable Gore would still be in the White House today--and even if not, he certainly would not be wandering around in public unaccompanied by his Secret Service detail. If Fatina Abdrabboh had her keys handed to her at all, it might have been by a gruff law-enforcement agent rather than by the suave erstwhile veep.

There's no way of knowing how much such an encounter would have deepened Fatina Abdrabboh's alienation and intensified her anger, or how those feelings might eventually have expressed themselves. What we do know is that thanks to Al Gore--with a little help from William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas--we'll never have to find out.