Frothing Frenzy
October 12, 2007
Quite a decade Al Gore is having: first he wins the 2000 presidential election, and now he gets to share this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N. panel on climate change. He never got to enjoy the first accomplishment, but there’s no way the Supreme Court can rob him of this one — even if Scalia and Thomas figure out a way to suspend airline service to Scandinavia, or King George II decides to bomb Norway and Sweden, Gore’s name is on the thing and that’s that.
My e-mail box at work regularly gets spam from NewsMax. Usually it’s the latest announcement from Dick Morris about Hillary’s plot to remove the testicles of every man in America, or the latest pseudo-outrage causing a flap throughout wingerdom.
Today, I’m looking forward to the crap that’s going to come flooding in. Heads will be exploding the length and breadth of Wingnuttia. That sounds like a pretty nice way to start the weekend.
The Opinion Mill 
October 12, 2007 at 9:32 am
[…] The Opinion Mill […]
October 12, 2007 at 9:46 am
Yeah, Wingnuttia pretty much lost interest in the Nobel prize when they gave it to Arafat, then Carter. And what fantasy world are you living in where Gore won the 2000 presidential election? When the electoral votes were counted, he came in second. So what’s it like living in a world where things are as you would like them to be rather than as they are?
October 12, 2007 at 11:07 am
I have two words for you: Buddhist temple.
October 12, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Three phrases: “Al Gore”, “Global Warming”, and “Nobel Peace Prize”.
Any one of them can cause the usual Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing commenters to work themselves into a frenzy.
But putting all three together? It’s magic!
October 13, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Besides, who was the first to bring up Willie Horton in the ’88 primaries? It wasn’t Bush!
October 13, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Sigh . . . zombie wingnut arguments never die. The Democrats talked about the prison furlough program,not Willie Horton.
October 13, 2007 at 3:25 pm
That last “zombie wingnut argument” comes from “Washington Babylon” by those trusted right-wingers Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein.
October 13, 2007 at 4:49 pm
The only thing that’s trustworthy about Andrew Cockburn is that you know you can’t trust him. If he’s repeating that old guff, it only proves my point.
October 13, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Cockburn is definitely not trustworthy on environmental issues–he’s of the opinion that oil is constantly generated by the Earth,and he thinks global warming is good for our planet.
But–Gore says in his movie that all we need is political will from those in office to effect change on global warming. And what did he do as VP on the issue? Allow with Clinton the SUV exemption for lower fuel mileage, and advocate free market policies that drove environmental protection and labor protection laws down to the lowest common denominator. As I recall, the Clinton/Gore team was against signing the Kyoto Protocols for economic reasons as well.
I think Gore has become a different person in the past eight years, but he failed at the peak of his influence to agitate effectively for his number one issue. This lends credence to Cockburn’s suggestion that Gore is all about the marketable position when it suits him. Of course Gore took unmarketable positions on Iraq when very few others were willing to step up to the plate, but that was at a time when he was out of the limelight.