So.
Al Gore has a new book out. You may know that I've been a little critical of Al Gore in the past. I do think he was treated unfairly by the media before the 2000 "election," but I believe if he'd been a better candidate, that wouldn't have mattered as much.
I'm also one of those who thinks Gore plays a better role more-or-less outside the system, from private life. He's in the rare position of one who can criticize the system while knowing it inside out.
That said, I loved his appearance on The Daily Show last month and have ordered the new book from my local library.
What follows comes verbatim from news from me:
Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran a scathing review of Al Gore's new book. The review was written by Andrew Ferguson. Here's a link to the whole review and here's the first paragraph of it...You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.
The Post has now added a "slight" correction to the online version of the review. And I'll put it in smaller type because they did...Andrew Ferguson's June 10 Outlook article, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," said that former vice president Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.
Mark goes on from there. What struck me about this, though, is that it just seems almost too textbook an example of Republican dirty tricks to be believed. It's such a deranged thing to do, I'd almost believe it was something Al Franken cooked up for one of his books.
But no, apparently, it's real. Ferguson actually chose to make the thrust of his review about attacking Gore for not sourcing his quotes opinions...when he did exactly that.
On a completely unrelated matter, Ferguson is a senior writer for The Weekly Standard. This is a conservative publication with its other writers including the namecalling, imagination-poor John Podhoretz, and its editor, Jonathan Last thinks the Star Wars movies are pro-the empire.
6 comments:
I know! I've just been ranting about the absurd laziness of this one to my lone conservative friend, and even he had to agree it was just kind of beyond ridiculous.
Then he forwarded me links to some other righty writing on the book, the gist of which tended to be, "I'm too lazy to read this book, because the title's just not that enticing, and that somehow is a valid dismissal of it."
And then something else, with such contorted logic it made my head hurt, that basically agreed the Dems had been right about, um... everything, but then argued that being right didn't matter? That one was almost magical.
Sad to say, in my most toxically cynical moments, I think that's quite correct.
Being right *doesn't* matter.
I think that's why, against all logic, republicans kept beating Democrats.
They have accepted that and learnt to use it to their advantage, while Democrats still deny it.
In my most toxically cynical moments.
The crazy thing is, though, that they actually *don't* keep beating Democrats. They actually lost to Democrats pretty spectacularly just a few short months ago, their president's approval ratings are dismal, his domestic agenda is essentially dead in its tracks, his foreign policy is a phenomenal failure, and phenomenally unpopular to boot, any close look at the congressional seats up for reelection in 2008 suggests that they are up for an even more spectacular loss soon enough, and their slate of presidential contenders is absurd, while ours, though not perfect, is probably the strongest its been in years. Yet they've so convinced us of this notion that they keep beating us, that we're still stuck in it, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
The reality is that the more the Democratic leadership accomodates Bush, the less popular it becomes. The clearest example of that would be the plunge in popularity Congress took after caving on the war funding bill. The absurd electoral strategy of playing to the illusory swing voter, and neglecting the base, which has already failed in two presidential elections, is just about the only way the Dems can lose in 2008. Basically, if they really, really try hard, to run a worse campaign than Kerry did. Which is pretty much impossible, right?
And I do think being right matters - I just think the sorry state of our media has made it entirely too hard for most people to figure out who's been right about most things. People shouldn't have to do so much work to get basic facts as they do just now. And odds are they aren't going to, because it's just not going to occur to them that what they're getting from CNN, MSNBC, or wherever isn't the whole story.
You're preaching to the converted, really. I agree with virtually everything you said.
It's just hard, sometimes, when you look at how all the networks, cable or broadcast, seem to slant their stories all the time not to grow cynical.
That's why I tried to take pains to say that I only believe the other stuff during my cynical days.
My favorite recent moment of MSM surreality was in someone or other's commentary on Bush, and how he'd gone back to a strong focus on the mythological "War on Terror," because it had been so successful in the 2004 & 2006 elections. For a second, I felt like I'd been swallowed up into a parallel universe, because, you know, 2006 wasn't actually successful for them.
And it wasn't Fox, I don't remember who it was, or which network, but it was more like CNN, which made such a complete misstatement all the more astounding.
I almost never watch that stuff, so when I happen upon it, I'm really just appalled by how quickly it's become so incredibly bad.
Frankly, reviews like this simply prove Gore's point in the book. The problem is, people who need the message will never read it.
a'mee
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