the Left would be shrieking just as loudly about Bush stomping all over their precious sovereign rights.

This isn't about the Left, it's about the alternate path I think would be superior to the one Bush chose. Besides, you're seeing things through the filter of rabid partisanship. Just as "staying the course" in Afghanistan would be reasonable and would garner (or sustain) broad support around the world, it'd be less objectionable to a broad swath of "the Left". You should be careful about buying into your stereotypes and confusing them with reality.

My point on Gore is that he would have behaved no differently than any other Democrat, or Republican for that matter, towards Saudi Arabia.

I have to disagree. There's too much evidence, albeit no smoking gun, that the Bush family has too many ties to too many powerful Saudis to allow Dubya to act with complete independence. Try and explain away the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 report. People who know what's there have dropped as many hints as they can get away with and still stay within the bounds of secrecy. I'll be more likely to believe that Bush has no conflict of interest regarding Saudi Arabia when those 28 pages are released.

McCain and Gore and almost any other possible alternate-universe President you could think of would not be tainted by a Saudi connection. It's plain as the nose on your face.

The Democratic idea of increasing automobile efficiency is to simply pass a law requiring cars to increase their mileage, like it's simply a matter of passing a decree to make the engineering appear

C'mon, Tom, cute rhetoric, but you know better. Mileage standards encourage R&D investment in better gas mileage, and that's what makes the engineering "appear". If car companies don't spend the money on that kind of R&D then, QED, the mileage improvements can't happen. It's like saying that investing in the space program in the '60s made the Apollo technology magically "appear" out of thin air. There's a simple cause-and-effect relationship between investment in engineering and subsequent results.

You're trying to have it both ways. You're a True Believer in American ingenuity and technological prowess capable of overcoming any obstacle...except when that would conflict with your ideology.