Gore Debate Heats Up

At Right Wing Nuthouse, Rick Moran scoffs at both the award and a Gore '08 bid:

"Let's put it this way; I doubt whether Hillary Clinton is losing any sleep over a potential Gore candidacy. She's way ahead, she has more money than God, and it's just about 90 days to the New Hampshire primary -- not enough time to pull an organization together, raise the money, and run any kind of a professional campaign. It's not that his chances of success would be small. His chances of success would be zero.

"All that aside, just what has the Nobel Committee done by giving the prize to a man a British Court called an 'alarmist' just the other day? He is a man whose major achievement -- his film Inconvenient Truth -- has been debunked even by scientists who share his fears of climate change. Other scientists have called on the former Vice President to quit being such an alarmist.

"The fact is, Gore's major 'contribution' to the global warming debate has been shown to be at the very least problematic and at worse, a shameless piece of propaganda. Yeah -- but at least his heart is in the right place.

"I can never decide whether Gore is being used by the Luddites, the one worlders, the NGO's, the anti-globalists, and the anti-industrialists as a front man for the implementation of their political agendas or whether he actually agrees with many of their ideas. The fact is, it's not about the science. It's never been about the science."

And on that subject, Danish author Bjorn Lonborg had a piece in Saturday's Boston Herald subtitled "Gore's Win is a Loss for Science." The same day's Boston Globe had a piece titled "An Inconvenient Peace Prize" by . . . Bjorn Lonborg. The exact same piece.

How does he do that?

How much of an advantage is Hillary Rodham Clinton's gender? The New Republic's Noam Scheiber raises an angle I hadn't thought of:

"This graf in Anne Kornblut's piece in The Post was kind of interesting:

" At the next Clinton stop, a town hall meeting in Derry, N.H., Leslie Harrison, 52, said the fact that Clinton is a woman is important as she considers how to vote in the New Hampshire primary. 'Men have been making a mess of things for a long time,' she said. 'A woman would be more sensitive to sending our children off to war.'

"It made me wonder if being a woman has made it easier for Hillary to inch away from her Iraq vote. Maybe people (especially anti-war women) are more likely to believe she didn't have her heart in it (whether or not that's actually the case), or even to forget she voted to authorize the war in the first place. And, if that's true, maybe her vote on the recent Lieberman-Kyl Iran amendment won't be as damaging as it could be, since voters will be more likely to believe her when she says it wasn't a vote to justify or authorize military action.

"In a sense, Hillary may get the best of both worlds here. She can compile a relatively hawkish record, which she can then emphasize in the general election should she win the nomination. But, because of people's biases about female candidates, the votes aren't as costly for her in the primaries as they might be for a man."