Letters to the Editor
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Poor Al Gore and Grover Cleveland
For the record, Grover Cleveland was the last dude to "win the popular vote and lose the [presidential] election." This was the election of 1888. Grover Cleveland, the Democrat, won nearly 100,000 more votes than Republican Benjamin Harrison, but lost the electoral college 168-233.
Check out Dave Leip's atlas of electoral results for more information. http://uselectionatlas.org/
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You "declined ..."
Nice call, Andrew. I hope to hell you didn't cast your vote for that egomaniac creep Nader in Florida or New Hampshire. Anyone who couldn't see the difference between Al Gore and some overgrown frat boy Republican from Texas had -- has -- a problem.
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It's About Global Warming, Not About An Election
Of course Al Gore's documentary on global warming doesn't answer the question "Will he run?" It's about global warming. Not about an election. He really, really wanted to be involved in a documentary about the clear and present danger to our planet. Is that really so hard to believe? Why would you expect him to inject election prospects into it? If he did, you'd scoff at him "That Al Gore... he's such a user! Look how he pretends to care about the environment when he's really just shilling for the presidential nomination."
And no, it's not going to bring in the Fox News crowd. But it might bring in some young people who have been told by the media that Al Gore is stiff and dull and dumb and a strawman to poke pitchforks at. And they may see the irony in the fact that the media presents Al Gore as this twin being - dull, stiff, wonky one minute; the next minute he's a wildman, a bearded, crazed lunatic frothing at the mouth, making hysterical claims about imagined dangers to the earth. The media does the same thing with Hillary Clinton. One minute she's a cold-hearted, trigger-happy adulteress offing her lover Vince Foster, disposing of his body in a park all by herself; the next minute she's a happy lesbian surrounded by her sapphic sisters, married to a merkin she manipulates for her own aims.
Sure, most young people will swallow the media's latest 15 second sound bite on Gore because it's the easy thing to do. But a significant number of young people are more deeply attuned to the hypocrisy of an older generation of self-satisfied professional spokespersons. They may go to see the movie specifically because the media makes a fuss over it and tells them, in a blatantly condescending way, not to bother, move along, nothing to see here, kids.
The demonization of Al Gore by the old-folks media may be the best thing that can happen to him right about now.
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Congratulations!
Good job, Andrew. It takes a big man to admit he made a mistake.
It takes a slightly smaller man five years, one stolen election, two wars, two hard-right Supreme Court Justices, "legalized" torture, the unitary executive, rampant governmental corruption, environmental catastrophe, and one-party rule to realize he made a mistake. Kudos to you!
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more shots at Al
I love the way our writers pretend to praise Al Gore while simultaneously smearing him with the same old tired jive.
Gore presents a "wonky but highly effective" presentation which is of course, not just a presentation but is a "lecture-demonstration". There he goes again, boring Al Gore, giving a boring lecture.
Not much later we get "Guggenheim seems to see the 2000 election as the third, and perhaps most decisive, of Gore's life-changing personal trials." In a new twist (most of our media just pretend to read Gore's mind) O'Heir reads the director's mind reading Gore's mind. Amazing!
Next we get an entire paragraph full of golden oldies. Gore "preaches", and we're reminded that "yes, his lectures are sometimes dense and wonky affairs". What does O'Heir mean with the "yes" part? Who is this imaginary dull, lazy person O'Heir agrees with by throwing in the "yes"?
Of course Gore's unsexiness gets a point: "Hey, babe, wanna catch the flick about Al Gore's slide show?"
And right in line with the "Al Gore is crazy" smear, we're told that Gore is "strange"--and not only that, he's also "portly". His Tennessee accent is "slightly put-on" (Once again, Gore's inner thoughts are divined and he is declared a phony), and we're reminded that "he was mostly raised in a Washington hotel suite". Ah yes, the privileged childhood spent in a swank hotel suite. Andrew, you might want to look into that a little further.
And there's still more of this tired shit. Next we get the news that Gore is "uncomfortable in his own skin", in case we didn't get it when the Beltway media falsely smeared Gore with it in 2000.
And still we're not done! Apparently, Gore didn't know who he was until recently, because we're informed that it looks like he has finally "become his own man."
No, it's not necessary to praise the man exclusively. Of course not. But I don't believe the author is sharing original thoughts. He's just repeating the same old shameful, false smears we've heard for years.
Andrew, of course Al Gore isn't getting back into politics! He's smart. He knows that he'll just get smeared again. Your article is the perfect example. You can't even praise him without repeating all the doozies: Gore's a phony, Gore doesn't know who he is, Gore's strange, Gore's not sexy, preachy Gore is always boring us with wonky boring lectures.
Andrew, I usually like your writing, but this stuff is lazy.
GF
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whoops
Sorry for spelling your name wrong (twice), Andrew.
GF
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Our strange, crazy, wonky, unsexy, hysterical, phony press
Right, even now that the press is discovering there is something significant to Al Gore, they can't avoid repeating the same nonsense about him they've peddled for years. Why did the crazy, hysterical press decide to hate him so much in 2000? The lazy, dull, shilling, shiftless press repeated as fact in every story the distortions about his internet statements, the lies about his Love Canal statements, his wooden personality (another case of too many DC consultants), his wonkiness (My god for a little wonkiness these days!) his privileged upbringing (like Bush didn't have one of those.) and his "put-on" Tennesse accent without even the appearance of effort to determine if any of it was actually true. You would expect this kind of lazy "reporting" from the strange, hysterical, unsexy, Fauxy news people, but not O'Hehir.