This is a 7-page article - might want to print out to read if interested in the continuing expose of hypocritical Al.
Whose Ox Is Gored?
By John Fund for Opinion Journal
March 19, 2007
The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the
New York Times and the
Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist.
Last Tuesday, the
Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous." The
Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal."
for full article:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009804
Have no fear - Al Bore is here
Can Gore Let It Rip?
Next time he runs for president, things will be different. That was Al Gore's pledge to Democrats after the 2000 election: "If I had to do it all over again, I'd just let it rip. To hell with the polls, the tactics and all the rest. I would have poured out my heart and my vision for America's future."
Those words had a familiar ring. Fifteen years ago -- before he was vice president -- Gore wrote about his internal struggle between ambition and conscience: "I have become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously." He added, "Now, every time I pause to consider whether I have gone too far out on a limb, I look at the new facts that continue to pour in from around the world and conclude that I have not gone nearly far enough."
Gore's topic then was global warming -- the same subject that brings him, fresh from the Oscars, to Capitol Hill.
Will Gore run in 2008? The question will echo throughout his appearances Wednesday before the House and Senate committees dealing with climate change. It likely will echo through all of American politics for months to come. There are two ways to ponder the question.
The logic of politics suggests Gore has already given his answer. He is not raising money. He is not urging friends and associates to stay on the sidelines until he makes a decision. He has said repeatedly that he has no plans to run. Shouldn't we take him at his word?
Not yet, we shouldn't. The logic of psychology and even history suggests that Gore should run. And if he should run, it is hard to believe that a man who has organized most of his adult life around public service and the pursuit of the presidency won't in the end actually do it.
For the moment, Gore's legacy in American politics rests on two opposing facts:
-- From the perspective of Democrats, no politician has been more right, more often, on more important questions. On global warming, words that had a radical edge in 1992 -- and still do, to many conservative ears -- Gore wrote "Earth in the Balance," anticipating mainstream liberal rhetoric by a decade. Many Washington Democrats cringed at what they regarded as his shrill people-vs.-powerful 2000 convention speech, when he warned that a Bush presidency would favor special interests and the wealthy. They cringed even more in 2002 at what they regarded as Gore's naive warnings that the coming Iraq war was a disaster in waiting and a distraction from other fronts in the campaign against terrorism. But within a year or so of both speeches, most Democrats inside Washington and beyond essentially embraced Gore's argument and tone.
-- From the perspective of people who believe, as nearly all Democrats do, that the Bush presidency has been a historic debacle, no Democratic politician is more culpable for these consequences than Gore himself. A more poised, focused and self-confident campaign surely would have won the election and not just the popular vote in 2000. As the chosen leader of his party, Gore had a responsibility to wage that campaign.
Both Gore's success in perceiving issues and his failure as a political leader powerfully suggest an unfinished career. Will this highly competitive man not wish to confront and transcend what surely counts as the most agonizing defeat in U.S. presidential history? Will a man who has spent decades thinking about the direction of the country and world not sense an obligation to seek a job where he would have by far the most influence on both?
It is too late for a conventional campaign. But it is not too late for an unconventional one -- probably the better choice for someone who has had an ambivalent and even tortured relationship with conventional politics. If the competition between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) leaves the Democratic field unsettled for months, as seems entirely possible, Gore could forsake organization and plunge into the race as late as next winter, instantly transforming the contest.
That scenario would confront Democrats with the same question they have about Clinton and Obama: Who is the best bet to win the White House? In Gore's case, the question has a more personal subtext: Why is it that running for office seems for him such an exquisitely awkward endeavor?
One place to look for an answer is comparing him to the man for whom running for office is an exquisitely joyful endeavor. Reporters who have spent time around Bill Clinton in off-the-record settings discover an entirely familiar figure. One perks up hearing profanity from a president. He is more candid in such settings about his political calculations, and those of his rivals, than he would ever be in public. But it is a narrow distance between what the private Clinton thinks and says and what the public Clinton thinks and says. That is why politics is easy for him.
Gore in private can be enormously engaging -- curious, funny, self-aware and self-mocking -- a side he sometimes showed reporters as vice president. He can also be maddening -- brooding, self-righteous, sarcastic and condescending -- a side that White House and campaign subordinates saw more often than they wished.
In "Earth in the Balance" -- written at a time when Gore had put aside presidential politics -- he revealed how a man whose public profile was as a moderate Southern Democrat actually harbored the intellectual instincts of a Utopian. He called for eliminating the internal combustion engine by 2017 and for making environmentalism "the central organizing principle for civilization." But in 2000, environmentalism was not even an organizing principle of his own campaign.
What all these fragmentary sides of Gore show is the gulf between what the private Gore thinks and what the public Gore, most of the time, believes he can safely say. That is why politics is hard for him.
All ambitious politicians wrestle with what they think is right versus what they think is politically possible. In Gore's case, this process has been more painful -- and his stumbles more consequential. At the Capitol this week, Gore will again be inching out on that limb he wrote about 15 years ago. Is he ready to just let it rip?
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0307/3203.html
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