The Real Al Gore

[babylonsister]

Fair warning: this is not at all complimentary. Don't blame me if you find it offensive. If you see glaring lies or errors, I hope you post them. This writer is NOT a fan.


The Real Al Gore
by Alexander Cockburn
{from the November 5, 2007 issue}

Line up some of the more notorious Nobel Peace Prize recipients, such as Kissinger, and if you had to identify the biggest killer of all it was probably Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the Green Revolution, which unleashed displacement, malnutrition and death across the Third World. If the Kyoto Accords were ever implemented, and they never will be, the net impact on greenhouse gases--99.72 percent of them natural in origin--would be imperceptible, but the devastation to Third World economies and life expectancies would rival that caused by Borlaug's seed strains.

Already the hysteria about anthropogenic global warming stoked by Al Gore and the Big Lie gang writing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's press releases has done enormous damage to vital environmental cleanup, sidetracking attention and money from work on sewers, toxic waste sites, filthy smokestacks--not to mention the vast disaster of agricultural pollution. Two other consequences of the hysteria will be deadly. Biofuels will steal the meals of the Third World poor and put them in First World gas tanks. Nuclear power is the hysteria's prime beneficiary. As Peter Montague describes it in our current CounterPunch newsletter, "The long-awaited and much-advertised 'nuclear renaissance' actually got under way this fall." NRG Energy, a New Jersey company, applied for a license to build two nuclear power plants in Bay City, Texas--the first formal application for such a license in thirty years.

NRG can confidently await the green light for two reasons. Using the fakery over the supposed effects of man-made greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, the nuclear industry successfully lobbied to pass the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which provides four different kinds of subsidies for atomic power plants. The other shoe promptly dropped with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's sweeping revision of its procedures, drastically attenuating the approval process for new plants. As nuclear plants start to sprout like toadstools across the landscape, it is certainly appropriate to lay a large measure of the blame on Al Gore, who has been a shill for the nuclear industry ever since he came of age as a political harlot for the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory in his home state of Tennessee.

For a Man of Peace, Gore has plenty of blood on his CV. Looking back through the 1980s, we find that on every relevant issue, whether it was supporting the contras or Reagan's bombing of Libya in 1986, shilling for the Pentagon's latest weapons systems, voting for nerve gas or backing the Reagan/Bush position on NATO deployments in Europe, Gore's hawkishness was unflagging. In the course of his career he voted for the neutron bomb, the B-2 bomber, the Trident II missile, the MX missile and the Midgetman. He also backed the mini-Star Wars plan. The defense contractors always loved Al, the same way the nuclear plant manufacturers do today.

When it came to Bush Senior's attack on Iraq, Gore's antics astounded even his hardened colleagues in the Senate as they debated the war resolution. Of course he had long since decided to vote aye on war, having been a hardliner on Iraq since 1988. But on January 12, 1991, he spun out his supposed travails in coming to this decision in prime-time posturing, speaking of his "heavy burden of conscience" and the lonely weeks "questioning, probing, searching for the truth." Saddam, he proclaimed, "has more troops than Hitler did in the early years of World War II." In the New York Times he wrote, "We can no more look forward to a constructive long-term relationship with Saddam Hussein than we could hope to housebreak a cobra" and that the Iraqi dictator is not "an acceptable part of the landscape."

more...

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071105&s=cockburn

[IndyOp]

1. I heard Alexander Cockburn last week - he is wrong about the climate crisis-

The Nobel Prize was given to Al Gore & hundreds (thousands?) of scientists of the IPCC -- I am going to side with the IPCC, not Alexander Cockburn.

I don't think Cockburn is "being bribed by the oil lobby" -- I think he just isn't thinking at all clearly about the climate crisis and now everything that Gore has touched. AL isn't perfect - he was brainwashed by DLC thinking for a long time - I think he sees a new way now.

On edit: Cockburn is right that we need to pay very, very, very careful attention to make sure that biofuels & nuclear power are NOT considered solutions to global warming. The Bush family - especially Jeb - are very, very excited about biofuels and Dick Cheney has been a cheerleader for nuclear power for decades. These are the WRONG way to go to solve the climate crisis -- but that does not mean that there is not a climate crisis

[TwilightGardener]

2. ...

:popcorn:

[Uncle Joe]

3. Alexander Cockburn enabled Bush to power, here is a small sample of his wisdom.

Please click on links for full column.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh060107.shtml

The Nation took the most novel approach. As late as October 16, 2000, it published a crackpot piece by Alexander Cockburn. (At present, Cockburn claims that global warming is a hoax and that Gore is a tool of the nuclear industry.) Weeks before the nation would vote, Cockburn recited endless claims about Big Liar Gore (He said that he invented the Internet! He lied about the union lullaby!), then ended with this stirring paragraph:

COCKBURN (10/16/00): Gore's a fibber through and through, just like Bill. A sad experience in the closing weeks of the campaign is to encounter liberals desperately trying delude themselves that there is some political decency or promise in the Democratic ticket. There isn't. Why talk about the lesser of two evils, when Gore is easily as bad as Bush and in many ways worse? The "lesser of two evils" is by definition a matter of restricted choice, like a man on a raft facing the decision of whether to drink seawater or his own urine. But in this election there are other choices, starting with Nader and the Greens. It isn't just a matter of facing seawater or piss.

<snip>
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh051905.shtml

COCKBURN (10/16/00): What an odd presidential race! So long as George W. Bush keeps his mouth shut and remains in seclusion he floats up in the polls. His best strategy would be to bag the debates, take Laura on an extended vacation and come back a couple of days before the election. Meanwhile, Gore reinvents himself on an almost daily basis. Nothing has been more comical than his "populist" posturings about the Republicans being the ticket of Big Oil and himself and Lieberman being the champions of the little people...

Gore's "populism" is comical, yet one more facet of a larger mendacity. What suppressed psychic tumult drives him to those stretchers that litter his career, the lies large and small about his life and achievements? You'd think that a man exposed to as much public derision as was Gore after claiming he and Tipper were the model for the couple in Love Story, or after saying he'd invented the Internet, would by now be more prudent in his vauntings. But no. Just as a klepto's fingers inevitably stray toward the cash register, so too does Gore persist in his fabrications.


http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh090707.shtml

March 1999 through November 2000: An ugly, twenty-month war against Gore is waged by the mainstream press corps. (Not “by Fox,” although they play too.) Liberal writers cower and quake, refusing to speak, confront or challenge. Among liberal and progressive journals, the silence is deafening–and it lasts for two years. What does the record show? In the course of this twenty-month war, The American Prospect and The Washington Monthly publish single, stand-alone articles of complaint. Essentially, The New Republic says nothing at all. And as late as October 2000, The Nation is still printing this political porn, courtesy of Alexander Cockburn. To remember the way you were served by this crew, let’s revisit this crackpot’s sad musings. By the way, he’s a warming denier:

COCKBURN (10/16/00): What suppressed psychic tumult drives to those stretchers that litter his career, the lies large and small about his life and achievements? You'd think that a man exposed to as much public derision as was Gore after claiming he and Tipper were the model for the couple in Love Story, or after saying he'd invented the Internet, would by now be more prudent in his vauntings. But no. Just as a klepto's fingers inevitably stray toward the cash register, so too does Gore persist in his fabrications.

<snip>

[Uncle Joe]

4. P.S. I believe Cockburn thought Bush would float to the top of the polls

because he knew the corporate media was carrying Bush's talking points for him. For so long as they were slandering Al Gore, Bush didn't have to say shit. I believe they were motivated to trash and slander our best and brightest and enable a corrupt incompetent to power because Al Gore did the most populist thing of all, empower the people by championing the Internet while he was in congress, thus threatening their monopoly on information, information = money, power and influence and they saw this as slipping away.

"COCKBURN (10/16/00): What an odd presidential race! So long as George W. Bush keeps his mouth shut and remains in seclusion he floats up in the polls."

[rosesaylavee]

5. What proof does cockburn give for HIS assertions?

Looks to me like he's the one spouting opinions not backed up by science.

What's wrong with editorial crew on the Nation that they would print this crap?