E. J. Dionne: Free To Be Al Gore

[RamboLiberal]

Boy, it would be fun if Al Gore changed his mind and ran for president -- fun for the voters, anyway. Imagine a candidate whose preelection book is devoted in large part to an attack on the media for waging war on reason.

Politicians, it is often said, never win by attacking the media. That's simply not true. Conservatives have been attacking the media for decades, to good effect from their point of view. Their intimidation sometimes worked -- go back to the coverage of the 2000 Florida recount if you want to see media bias. When intimidation fails, they declare inconvenient facts to be merely "liberal" opinions.

It's delightful to see the critique coming from the other side. Gore's book, "The Assault on Reason," to be released today, is about "the strangeness of our public discourse" as mediated through television. He thinks the Internet may revive the art of reasoned argument that has been lost in our obsessions with "Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole."

It's entertaining to talk to Gore these days because he's so clearly enjoying himself. (That's probably why he won't run for president.) During a 40-minute telephone interview yesterday, he did not speak as if there were focus-grouped sentences dancing around in his head. Nor did he worry about saying things that some consultant would fret about for weeks afterward.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/21/AR2007052101437.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

[jaysunb]

1. k&r

:thumbsup:

[ninkasi]

2. Another K&R

for a good editorial.

[Sick_of_Rethuggery]

3. K & R for more reason in our...

political discourse!

[Uncle Joe]

4. Overall a good column, but I disagree strongly with this paragraph

"For example, when Gore is asked if any of the Democrats running for president were changing the system he holds in such low esteem, he pulls no punches. "They're good people trapped in a bad system," he says, "and I think it's the system that needs to be changed and I don't see them changing it." The campaign dialogue so far, he says, has not been "very enriching or illuminating" in "either party." But, no, that doesn't mean he's going to run, though he never completely shuts the door. It's part of the fun he's having."

Al Gore loves his nation, not to mention the rest of the planet too much for this to be true. I don't believe Al speaking the truth regarding the current state of our dysfunctional Big Brother Government and their Mass Corporate Media enablers is any fun at all for him.

If Al gets any satisfaction from speaking the truth, it's surely tempered by the obfuscation spun on his message by the Mass Corporate Media. However knowing your government and media to be a bad system trapping good people can't be a comforting piece of information for anyone except for those enabled and empowered by said dysfunctional and corrupt system.