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AL GORE WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!!!

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Bianca
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« Reply #30 on: October 15, 2007, 08:47:44 am »








                                                Gore Derangement Syndrome
               



 
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
Published: October 15, 2007

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get.

Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.
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Bianca
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« Reply #31 on: October 17, 2007, 01:37:33 pm »







                                                 Better than being president





by Jack Lessenberry |
Oct 17 2007   


The day after Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, the lead editorial in The New York Times began: "One can generate a lot of heartburn thinking about all the things that would be better about the country and the world if the Supreme Court had done the right thing," seven years ago. In other words, if the man who won the popular vote had become president of the United States.

Yes, of course Gore would have been a better president than the present disgrace, but then so would my Aunt Sally. Now, freed of Bill Clinton's shadow, seasoned and far more confident, he could be far greater.

Most defeated presidential candidates vanish from view. Heard about Michael Dukakis lately? Seen John Kerry? Say, what's Bob Dole been up to?

Nobody knows, or cares. Yet Albert Gore has reinvented himself as a hero on a worldwide scale, trying to shock us into consciousness about what we are doing to this earth. And he is succeeding, even when jeered by the criminal element of the right wing for telling the truth about our "planetary emergency."

Now, within the last several months, Albert Arnold Gore Jr. has won both an Academy Award (aka an Oscar) and the Nobel Peace Prize, something nobody else has ever done. Internationally, no American receives anything like the admiration and respect he does. He has more knowledge and political experience than any of the candidates in either party.

Were he to be the nominee, he would be a heavy favorite to win, and my guess is that it wouldn't even be close this time. So — will he? Should he run for president?

My somewhat informed guesses are no to both questions. Now, if the question were, should Albert Gore be president of the United States, my answer would be yes, beyond any doubt. Yet I am fairly sure he won't run. For years now, he has devoted his energies to saving the environment — saving the planet. He knows how important that is, and actually believes in his cause more than himself.

He knows that if he ran, immediately that would be lost and all the good work he has done would be instantly suspect. Scientists would pull away from him, lest they be seen as mere pawns to be used in achieving power.

Many of the people praising Gore now would savagely attack him. He would have to get in an immense fight with Hillary and Bill Clinton. He would have to stand at podiums next to the likes of Mike (who?) Gravel.

Rahm Emanuel, an influential Illinois congressman who worked on Hillary Clinton's ill-starred health care proposal, put it this way: "Why would he run for president when he can be a demigod? He now towers over all of us."

Were he to run, that would end in a moment.

In a perfect world, the Democrats would beg him to run. They would hand him the nomination on a silver platter. That, however, isn't going to happen.

Yet you don't have to be president to be influential. You can even be the most important person on the planet without being in politics. Bill Gates knows all about that, as did that other Albert, Einstein.

Now Albert Gore knows it too. When it comes to the presidency, you can never say never. Just don't look for it to happen for him now. But I intend to cast a write-in vote for the man who should be president in the Michigan primary, if there is one. You can try to figure out who I am voting for.

* * *


About author
Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Detroit's Metro Times.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2007, 01:38:52 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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Bianca
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« Reply #32 on: October 17, 2007, 04:38:34 pm »








Why Big Media Slimes Al Gore





by Robert Parry |
Oct 17 2007 



New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has a point when he describes the rabid reaction of right-wingers to Al Gore, with the latest foaming at the mouth over the former vice president winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming.

But the Right is not alone in its pathological demeaning of Gore. The major news media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, have taken their share of unfair shots at Gore, ironically for reasons similar to those that Krugman attributes to the Right.

In his column on Oct. 15, Krugman observed that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page commented on Gore’s prize simply by running a list of people whom it considered more deserving. A National Review Online article linked Gore to Osama bin Laden because the Saudi terrorist once made a remark about the dangers of global warming.

“What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?” Krugman asked. “Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House.

“Both the personality cult the Right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.” [See “Gore Derangement Syndrome,” NYT, Oct. 15, 2007]

But the major U.S. news media, including Krugman’s own newspaper, appears to have acted with much the same goal, protecting Bush’s legitimacy at the start of his presidency and insulating him from doubts about his competence after the 9/11 attacks.

This favoritism toward Bush dates back even further to the earliest days of Campaign 2000 when Gore was depicted as a “delusional” braggart and Bush was the “straight shooter” who would bring the “adults” back to Washington. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney” or our new book, Neck Deep.]

During the Florida recount battle, it was Gore who was viewed as the interloper who should spare the country a bitter election stalemate and simply concede defeat, even though he had won the national popular vote by more than a half million ballots.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many colleagues when he wrote that “given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”

After the unprecedented ruling by five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount and hand the presidency to Bush, the big news outlets turned to helping the nation heal its wounds by putting Bush’s illegitimacy off limits.
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« Reply #33 on: October 17, 2007, 04:48:31 pm »








Happy Days

While Bill Clinton faced what amounted to hazing during his presidential transition, major U.S. news outlets granted Bush an extended honeymoon. Washington welcomed the return of the “adults,” such as Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, who would surround the novice President with sound advice.

On Inauguration Day, network news coverage largely looked the other way when angry demonstrators surged toward Pennsylvania Avenue and Bush chose to forego a stately ride to the White House in favor of Secret Service agents hitting the accelerators.

Meanwhile, Gore was banished from politically respectable society. When he grew a beard or gained some weight, he became the butt of jokes not just from right-wing journalists but from mainstream pundits as well.

After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. news media pulled the wagons even tighter around the shaky, inexperienced Bush. It was in this climate of perceived national crisis that Bush’s “cult of personality” took flight.

However, Bush’s dubious election “victory” remained a shadow over his presidency, made worse when a media examination of legally cast Florida ballots was completed in November 2001 and found that Gore would have won a full recount regardless of which standard was applied to the “chads.”

Under a normal news judgment, the American people would have awakened to the startling headline that “Gore Would Have Won Full Florida Recount; Should Be the President.” But that would have provoked a political firestorm and raised fresh doubts about Bush’s legitimacy just two months after 9/11.

So, senior editors at the major mainstream news outlets chose to bury their own lede, focusing instead on hypothetical partial recounts that Bush still might have won.

“Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush,” according to the Washington Post’s headline on Nov. 12, 2001. Both the Post and the New York Times referred to Americans who questioned this interpretation as “Gore partisans.”

Post media critic Howard Kurtz ridiculed these doubters as “conspiracy theorists” in an article entitled “George W. Bush, Now More Than Ever.”

Kurtz also mocked people who believed that winning an election fairly, based on the will of the voters, was important in a democracy. “Now the question is: How many people still care about the election deadlock that last fall felt like the story of the century – and now faintly echoes like some distant Civil War battle?” he wrote.
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« Reply #34 on: October 17, 2007, 04:49:38 pm »








Real Results

A reader had to dig into the actual data – and ignore the ridicule – to find the real story. “Full Review Favors Gore,” the Washington Post acknowledged in a box on page 10, showing that under all standards applied to the ballots, Gore came out on top. The New York Times’ graphic revealed the same outcome.

After reading these stories, I wrote an article noting that the obvious lede should have been that Gore won. I suggested that the news judgments of senior editors might have been influenced by a desire to appear patriotic at a time of national crisis. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Gore’s Victory.”]

The article had been on the Internet for only an hour or two when I received an angry phone call from New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of then Times executive editor Howell Raines.

It was as if Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant analysis that had to be stamped out.

By the end of 2001 – after the initial U.S. military victory in Afghanistan – the major U.S. media slid into full-scale Bush hagiography.

On Dec. 23, 2001, for instance, NBC's Tim Russert joined New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and First Lady Laura Bush in ruminating about whether divine intervention put Bush in the White House to handle the 9/11 crisis.

Russert asked Mrs. Bush if “in an extraordinary way, this is why he was elected.” Mrs. Bush objected to Russert’s suggestion that “God picks the president, which he doesn’t.”

Giuliani thought otherwise: “I do think, Mrs. Bush, that there was some divine guidance in the president being elected. I do.” McCarrick also saw some larger purpose, saying: “I think I don’t thoroughly agree with the First Lady. I think that the president really, he was where he was when we needed him.”

Bush was soon the subject of flattering books, such as David Frum’s “The Right Man” and Bob Woodward’s “Bush at War.” The public fawning appeared to go to Bush’s head as he told Woodward that his presidential judgments were beyond questioning.

“I am the commander, see,” Bush said. “I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they need to say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

Before long, most major U.S. news outlets were lapping up whatever Bush and his team were pouring out about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
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Bianca
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« Reply #35 on: October 17, 2007, 04:50:52 pm »








Gore’s Netherworld



When Al Gore emerged from the political netherworld to question the wisdom of Bush’s plan for a preemptive war against Iraq, the former vice president was alternatively ignored and ridiculed.

Gore’s Sept. 23, 2002, speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco got little coverage – except to the extent that Bush’s supporters trashed it.

“Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered,” wrote Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. “It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts – bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]

“A pudding with no theme but much poison,” declared another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. “It was a disgrace – a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002]

While some depicted Gore’s motivation as political “opportunism,” columnist William Bennett mocked Gore for sealing his political doom and banishing himself “from the mainstream of public opinion.”

Even as Gore’s warnings proved prescient, he remained an object of disdain from a mainstream press corps that had no stomach for reexamining how it failed in its duty to ask the White House tough questions.

When the political pundits have deigned to mention the possibility of Gore running for president in 2008, they talk mostly about his waist line. This mainstream tendency to mock Gore has continued in the wake of his Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 12.

Almost every time Gore’s prize was mentioned on CNN, it was accompanied by a reference to a ruling by an obscure British judge named Michael Burton, who claimed to detect “nine errors” in Gore’s slide-show presentation for “An Inconvenient Truth.”

On Oct. 13, the Washington Post noted Gore’s prize in a snarky editorial that elevated Burton’s “nine errors” to “nine significant errors” and faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”

The reality, however, was that Burton’s ruling was based on misrepresentations of what Gore actually said in the documentary. At best, Burton’s objections could be considered quibbles. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again.”]

So, Krugman is surely correct to note the extraordinary hostility that Gore engenders from the Right. As Krugman wrote at the end of his Oct. 15 column, “Which brings us to the biggest reason the Right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.”

Yet it is perhaps even more troubling that much of the mainstream U.S. news media has refused to give up its own animus toward Gore.

From CNN to the Washington Post’s editorial page, senior news executives apparently still feel that it is more important to ingratiate themselves with President Bush and his powerful admirers than it is to show some fairness to the man who was the choice of a plurality of American voters in 2000.
_______



About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, ****, the Press & 'Project Truth.' Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News
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« Reply #36 on: October 18, 2007, 09:57:42 am »








                                      Al Gored: Imagine what the presidency could have been





by Alan Bisbort |
Oct 18 2007 

The ink was barely dry on the Nobel Peace Prize proclamation when the American media went into attack mode. "This will not stand," they seemed to collectively insist. "We thought we had successfully destroyed 'Al Bore, The Ozone Man.' How dare he create a new life and legacy for himself! How dare he think he can inject himself once again into our planned narrative! How dare he actually prove that he would have been the worthiest president these past eight years! Besides, he needs to lose a little weight, don't you think, and will he PLEASE stop insisting he invented the Internet ... la la la" [hands placed over ears].

Every story on TV, radio or in print about Al Gore's winning this most prestigious prize was accompanied by the disclaimer — in the third or fourth sentence — "but his work on climate change has not gone without its share of sharp criticism" and then segueing to an interview with an un-credentialed "scientific expert" from the "American Enterprise Institute" or "Freedom Fries Alliance" who offers mumbo jumbo about "the jury is still out on climate change."

American reporters also insisted on noting, repeatedly, that Gore was "sharing" the prize with the UN climate panel, to perhaps show that his prize wasn't worth as much as, say, the Dalai Lama's.

And, of course, Bush the Coward issued his usual classy response through spokesman Tony Fratto, who said, "we are happy for Vice President Gore." Knowing how the White House parses every single word of its lies, the "Vice President" was carefully chosen to place Gore at a subservient level to the Little Boy King from Crawford.

The most often cited "expert" and current poster boy for Climate Change Denial is Bjorn Lomborg. He apparently learned environmentalism from Ronald "Trees Pollute" Reagan and James "Just Use More Sunblock" Watt. Thus, as was covered in a recent New York Review of Books piece by Bill McKibben, Lomborg is a favorite on "right-wing radio and TV programs and has been summoned to offer helpful testimony by James Inhofe (R-OK), famous for his claim that global warming is a hoax."

In other words, Lomborg is either insane or he is lying and knows it but has, like the "scientists" who lied for the tobacco companies, found a cushy career niche as a Climate Change Denier (Exxon and Chevron have much deeper pockets than Philip Morris). Wherever he has appeared and made to answer to real experts about his renegade fact-free ideas on climate change — including at Yale two years ago — Lomborg is eviscerated, reduced to sputtering and grimacing like Ann Coulter. That he is allowed equal weight as a counterbalance to Al Gore and 99.9 percent of the climate scientists on earth in stories about the Nobel Peace Prize tells you how debased the American media has become. Lomborg is not worthy to tie Gore's shoes, yet he's quoted as if he shares the same stature, so that, even in his moment of greatest triumph, Gore can be demeaned.

What interests me most is not whether Gore will jump into the presidential race (though I'd be glad if he did), but how he handles the sniping ankle bites from the media. If he sighs, the sigh will be amped louder than Howard Dean's scream in Iowa. If he gets angry, he will be called "humorless." If he ignores them, he will be depicted as arrogant.

Gore should treat the media like recalcitrant children — with stern recitations of fact but a smile on his face. By doing this, he will seize the moral initiative and reveal his attackers as the shallow little lapdogs they are.

And the White House is his, if he wants it.
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« Reply #37 on: October 18, 2007, 11:25:00 am »

RE: "And the White House is his, if he wants it."

After it gets "fumigated"!!!!!
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Thus ye may find in thy mental and spiritual self, ye can make thyself just as happy or just as miserable as ye like. How miserable do ye want to be?......For you GROW to heaven, you don't GO to heaven. It is within thine own conscience that ye grow there.

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« Reply #38 on: October 18, 2007, 11:26:52 am »







..........and exorcized!!!
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