Gore Debate Heats Up

"Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. 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 Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

"And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job -- to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for -- the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

"The worst thing about Mr. 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 Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For conservatives, it's deeply threatening."

For Salon Editor Joan Walsh, it is--and I'm using the technical term--a nyahh-nyahh moment:

"It's like the best revenge fantasy ever, come true: Everyone who was ever mean to you, who wrote you off or sabotaged you? That nasty high school guidance counselor? The catty New York Times columnist? The partisan Supreme Court justice? Well, they can kiss your Oscar, your Emmy or your Nobel Peace Prize, because you won all three! In the same year!

"I'm sure Al Gore doesn't think that way. But I do. I find myself a little dispirited by Gore's well-deserved win. I feel like it's the universe telling us what a broken political system we have: This is the man who could have been, should have been, our 43rd president, but our political elites did him in. Especially the media elites, who chased stories about a blue dress and earth tones at the close of the 20th century, abetting the selection of George W. Bush, a man whom history is almost certain to judge our worst president. And he still has an additional 15 months in office."

Okay, let's swing the camera over to the right, and National Review's Jay Nordlinger:

"A word -- only a word -- about the Nobel Peace Prize. It was debased a long time ago. They gave it to Le Duc Tho. They gave it to Arafat. They gave it to Joseph Rotblat, a classic fellow-traveler. They gave it to a lady who plants trees and believes that the U.S. government invented AIDS in order to decimate black people. And, during the time of George W. Bush, they have given it to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore. What, they're snubbing Michael Moore and the Daily Kos guy?

"The Nobel peace committee is not so much a peace committee as a standard left-wing pressure group -- sending these Mickey Mouse 'messages.' They're like the board of the MacArthur Foundation, or the English department of Brown University or something -- there is no connection between what they do and quality. It's just straight politics, or, more accurately, ideology.

"Someone called the award to Gore 'a sick joke' -- and that's about right. The problem is, they turn around and give it to someone worthy, once in a blue moon."

How's that for a magnanimous approach?