Just who are they trying to kid by sucking up to him now after the way they castigated him in 2000. It makes me sick to see them review this book as if they carry no blame for the way this country is today.
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=131&subid=192&contentid=254325DLC | New Dem Dispatch | May 30, 2007
Gore Stands Up For Reason
Quickly following up on his highly influential book and Oscar-winning movie on global climate change, former Vice President Al Gore has published another book, The Assault On Reason, that provides a different kind of warning to Americans. While much of the reaction, pro and con, to the new book has naturally focused on its passionate critique of the policies of the Bush administration, Gore ultimately aims at a more fundamental and troubling aspect of contemporary politics: the growing displacement of fact-based persuasion by ideologically driven and manipulative propaganda. To put his argument most simply, political competition used to revolve around differences of opinion about how to interpret and apply facts. Now Americans differ crucially on the facts themselves.
Gore clearly and appropriately attributes much of this phenomenon to the president and his political advisors, who have so deliberately ignored and misrepresented basic facts on almost every policy front, while famously elevating political appointees over subject-matter experts, even on federally created science advisory boards.
But he also suggests deeper roots for the "assault on reason," including the decline of mainstream media as an impartial referee of facts in political debates; the dominance of news by a television medium that often treats politics as just another celebrity-watching entertainment product; and the baleful influence of a campaign finance regime that turns even the most high-minded politicians into cup-rattling supplicants before special interests.
snip
We've certainly been in synch with Gore's indictment of the Bush-Cheney habit of cavalier disregard for facts, dating back to the "Bush's Parallel Universe" series of New Dem Dispatches we published in 2004. And moreover, it's precisely the decline of fact- and reason-based political discourse that has led us this year to launch IdeasPrimary.org, in the belief that a return to a politics driven by ideas and values rather than polarization and manipulation can and should begin in next year's presidential campaign, and especially among Democrats.
In the end, this generation of Americans will be judged by history not simply for the condition of the country and its status in a dangerous world, but for the stewardship of a democratic tradition that has long separated this country from places where politics is barely indistinguishable from civil war. Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for reminding us of another inconvenient truth that we ignore at our national peril.
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