The Strange World of Al Gore

The Strange World of Al Gore
By Alan Caruba

There have been many times in his long public career when I have wondered whether Al Gore is just plain stupid or, as the British say, barking mad.

At some point, his neighbors and fellow Tennessee citizens must have concluded Gore was intellectually defective because, in his run for the presidency in 2000, he failed to get that State’s plurality. Maybe it had something to do with that long, long, long kiss he gave Tipper before accepting the nomination of his party? That was bizarre.

No one wants to admit that they may have voted for someone who is seriously stupid. Those who voted for Bush may have misgivings, but at least he does not go around saying the world is coming to an end from global warming while the nation and large parts of the globe are in the grip of bone-chilling cold and deep drifts of snow and ice.

Gore, however, bestrides the world making speeches and documentaries, and writing books while the rest of us give thanks he no longer has access to the power public office bestows. Indeed, in general, Al Gore is an object of ridicule, but that does not release us from the obligation to actually think about what he is doing and saying.

As this is written, his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”, is nominated for an Oscar, the highest award Hollywood gives. It puts forth as fact that Greenland’s glaciers are melting, that deaths from global warming “will double in the next 25 years”, and that global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet, “devastating coastal areas worldwide.” Everything from hurricanes to Malaria is blamed on global warming. Wild speculation substitutes for science. It’s stupid.

What is obscene, however, is the widespread effort to insure that students in schools around the world are exposed to this stinking pile of pseudo-science.

In terms of a sudden, dramatic rise in global average temperatures, Global Warming is not happening and given known climate cycles is extremely unlikely. The Earth is, in fact, nearing the end of an inter-glacial period and on the cusp of a new Ice Age. There is no known or provable science that supports his endless global warming-related claims. And that is the inconvenient truth about Gore’s apocalyptic documentary.

We’re informed, too, that Al Gore has been nominated to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. Alone among the other Nobel Prizes for economics, literature or medicine, the Peace Prize lost its credibility after it was given to a notorious terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and now a notorious anti-Semite, former President Jimmy Carter, whose center in Atlanta has been underwritten with great gobs of money from oil-rich Middle East sheiks.

In a similar fashion, in February 2006 Gore addressed an audience in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, saying that the U.S. government had committed “terrible abuses” against Arabs in America who he claimed were “indiscriminately rounded up.” He lamented the handling of Saudi visa applications, apparently having forgot that most of the 9-ll hijackers were Saudis. It turns out that there are 10,000 Saudis in the U.S. on student visas.

As to Iran’s announced intention to make nuclear weapons, Gore asked, “Is it only for the West to say this is dangerous?” Iran’s neighbors, however, think it is dangerous too. In one speech he managed to bash the United States and ignore what most rational people think is the greatest threat to peace since the rise of the Nazi regime. Now say to yourself “President Al Gore.” Scary, isn’t it?

What Al Gore wants all of us to do, aside from destroying America’s thriving economy with a system of greenhouse gas emission caps-and-credits, is to make major, personal lifestyle sacrifices and changes. Gore says we just consume too much of everything.

However, as USA Today pointed out in August of 2006, “he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, VA.” He also has a third home in Carthage, Tennessee. To get to and from his highly paid lectures, he uses jets that consume vast amounts of fossil fuel derivatives.

Can you spell h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e? We expect this kind of behavior from politicians and, except for a brief stint as a journalist, that’s what Al Gore has been his whole life.

One need only consult his bestseller, “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit” to realize that Gore has harbored some very strange and moronic ideas for a long time. My favorite is his expressed hope that “the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine” could be achieved in “say, a twenty-five year period.” Given that the book was originally published in 1992, we are just a decade shy of that goal.

In case you’re not familiar with the internal combustion engine, it can be found under the hood of every automobile and truck in the world!

Back in 1992, Gore’s book expressed the view that “The stunning victory of free market economics over communism in the global war of ideas has brought with it a new obligation to change those features of our economic philosophy that we know are flawed in the light of the ecological destruction they legitimize, and even encourage.”

There was nothing “stunning” about it. Even Communists knew their economic system was idiotic. China has been in the process of abandoning it since Mao died. The victory over communism included a forty-year Cold War and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the world discovered that Soviet communism included some of the worst environmental abuses ever witnessed.

So, apparently communism was bad, but capitalism is worse. This is why environmentalists are called “watermelons”; green on the outside and red on the inside. Gore is no exception to this. This is also why the aim of environmentalism is to gain control over the use of the world’s energy resources because to do so would mean control over the lives of everyone on Earth.

Right now, the Democrats who control Congress are doing everything in their power to enact legislation to fulfill Al Gore’s dream. Even some stupid Republicans support this.

As far as Al Gore is concerned, “one doesn’t have to travel around the world to witness humankind’s assault on the earth.” In the world according to Gore, it isn’t just capitalism that’s to blame, it is the whole of humanity. In the philosophy of Deep Ecology, if the Earth can just be rid of human beings, it will return to some lost Eden, some paradise of just animals and insects.

This hatred of humanity, of civilization, of industrialization, of expanding frontiers of science and technology lies at the heart of Al Gore’s philosophy. Is this insane or just stupid? Either way, it does not merit a Nobel Prize or an Oscar.

And it is contagious. Gore’s moronic embrace of Global Warming is widely accepted even in the face of raging blizzards in Colorado, frozen orange crops in California, and chill conditions throughout the Midwest and Northeast. There’s plenty of cold weather elsewhere in the world. We call this “winter.” Despite obvious and empirical evidence to the contrary, some people keep insisting the Earth is filled with signs of a sudden and calamitous warming.

I suggest that Gore’s life has been filled with signs of stupidity and his rabid embrace of Global Warming has the appearance of a serious delusion. It is one that poses a great danger for humanity.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. His book, “Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy”, is published by Merrill Press.

© Alan Caruba, 2007

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