Gore's rightness drives right nuts

[Alamom]

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_7191014?nclick_check=1


Gore's rightness drives right nuts
By Paul Krugman
Article Launched: 10/16/2007 01:34:39 AM PDT


On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, the Wall Street Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Gore's name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more. And at National Review Online, 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 Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose 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 Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.And now that Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job - to be, in fact, the best president Al-Qaida's recruiters could have hoped for - the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about 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 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.

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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 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.