October 12, 2007
Oh, please
Apple Inc. blows kisses at the Goreacle in its ever-so-stylish way. Note the elegant simplicity of the white background, with the subtle reflection of Mankind's secular savior's photo, as if resting on a polished surface.
Not everyone is so enamored with Gore's so-called accomplishments.
Take, for instance, Damian Thompson, writing for Britain's Telegraph
The former US Vice-President has already taken over from Michael Moore as the most sanctimonious lardbutt Yank on the planet. Can you imagine what he'll be like now that the Norwegian Nobel committee has given him the prize?
Just after Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth - in which he asked American households to cut their use of electricity - the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research took a look at Al's energy bills.
It reckoned that his 20-room, eight-bathroom mansion in Nashville sometimes uses twice the energy in one month that the average American household gets through in a year. The combined energy and gas bills for his estate came to nearly $30,000 in 2006. Ah, say his defenders, but he uses rainwater to flush his lavatories. Is there enough rainwater in the world, I wonder?
There are so many reasons why Gore shouldn't have won the peace prize for his preachiness. Alas, it is too late to influence their decision, but I'd have liked to refer the judges to a ruling by Mr Justice Burton, a High Court judge who has criticised the Government for sending out An Inconvenient Truth to schools without a health warning. The reason? It's full of errors and unsubstantiated claims.
The judge is not saying that Gore's basic thesis is wrong (and nor am I). In a way, his findings are more damning than that.
Gore claims that the rises in carbon dioxide and temperature over 650,000 years show an "exact fit". That's wrong, says Mr Justice Burton: there is a connection, but not a precise correlation.
Gore predicts sea levels rising by up to 20ft in the near future. Not so, according to the judge: that will happen only after millions of years.
Those low-lying Pacific atolls that Gore claims have been evacuated? No evidence. Polar bears who drowned swimming to look for ice? Again, no evidence: four bears have drowned - but because of a storm.
None of which will surprise seasoned Gore-watchers. The man is not, as his enemies maintained when he ran against George W. Bush in 2000, a pants-on-fire liar. He's an exaggerator and a braggart.
Gore struggles with his memory, too. [M]y favourite Gore memory lapse is his account of being sung to sleep with the lullaby Look for the Union Label, written in 1975. How sweet: being sung to sleep by your parents at the age of 27.
But there is a more fundamental objection to awarding Gore the peace prize that goes beyond issues of character. Climate change is a threat to the environment, not to "peace" and international order. The prize has gone to some sleazy recipients in the past, but at least you can make a case that their actions staved off bloodshed.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee lost all credibility when they decided Yasser Arafat -- a terrorist responsible for the deaths of countless men, women and children -- had somehow become a peace-loving statesman, notwithstanding his failure to ever express remorse for the blood he and his thugs spilled over nearly forty years.
Gore? He's just the latest, leastest in what will surely be an ever-less-relevant -- and less-deserving -- series of prize winners.
Big deal.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 12, 2007 09:18 PM
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