Al Gore Declares Mission Accomplished

Lurch out of balance: Rex Murphy of Canada’s National Post declares “Al Gore, friend of the petro-state,” in a nifty 500 word assault on Al’s reasoning:

Now comes the latest news that Al has sold Current, for the magnificent sum of $500-million, $100-million of which is his alone. Not bad for a TV station with less reach and inferior programming to most billboards.

To whom did the Lord of the Upper Atmosphere sell? Why to al Jazeera — which is to say, effectively to the ruler of Qatar, a wealthy country that has nothing else to sustain it but the sale of its huge petroleum resources.

Qatar is about oil, oil and more oil. It is a global warmer’s hell.

Surely there is some pill too tough to swallow in the idea of the world’s greatest alarmist on the subject of global warming, the evils of petroleum economies and the menace of fossil fuels accepting half-a-billion dollars from a state that utterly epitomizes the practices and product he most evangelistically despises.

But consistency or moral fortitude in the face of profit does not seem to be part of Al’s personal Powerpoint.

One other, not-to-be-missed note: Mr. Gore was very quick to make sure the sale took place before the New Year — the better to spare him, who is now one of the world’s superrich, his friend Barack Obama’s tax hike on those dreadful one-percenters.

That move alone was worthy of a Republican.

Ordinarily, I’d look at that last line and say something like, “that’ll leave a mark.” But of course it won’t — Al is utterly shameless, but we’ve known that for quite some time. Al’s enormous chutzpah has put $100 mil worth of “f*ck you money,” as they say in Hollywood into his bank account, but the inconvenient truth is that it was his pet cause that got f*cked.

Oh, and talk about coming full circle:

When you tell folks that your favorite TV program is Booknotes, you often receive somewhat disconcerted glances in return.  But there is a certain naive genius to Brian Lamb’s interrogatory technique.  Consider this exchange [from 1992, when Lamb interviewed Gore on Earth in the Balance]:  

GORE: I went through a change in my life when my son was almost killed a couple of years ago. It was a shattering experience for my family. He has had a miraculous recovery and we’re very blessed and very grateful to all the doctors and the nurses who — who — who helped to make it possible. But during the long weeks when my wife and I were in the hospital room with him, I began to really look at life a little bit differently and ask questions about what’s most important in life and, having already long since been deeply involved in this issue, I began to look at it differently also.

Instead of seeing it just as an outgrowth of the new scientific and technological salt on the Earth and the population explosion which is adding one China’s worth of people every 10 years now, I began to feel that the deeper causes are within our own lives as individuals. What gives us the notion that we are just isolated one from another with no responsibility to the future our children are going to live, no connection to the communities in — in which we live out our lives. And I began to explore, in a very personal way, what it is that leads to these false assumptions and how we can get on with the task of solving thi — this crisis and organizing a response that gives our children and grandchildren and generations to come an Earth that is not diminished and degraded by virtue of what we’re doing in our short lifetimes.

LAMB: How is your son?

That is simply brilliant.  This middle aged hack pol goes prattling on about how a sudden realization of human mortality forced him to reexamine his entire world view and deadpan Brian cuts to the quick to find out how the kid is.  The answer, thankfully, is that the Gores’ son is fine, which only makes their extravagant reaction to the accident even more frightening.   Suppose, God forbid, that Gore becomes President and something like this happens; you have to question whether a person who undergoes such a seachange in their personal philosophy at a moment of admitted stress but surely not of catastrophe is even fit to govern.

Rush may keep “Al Gore’s Doomsday Clock” running on the homepage of his Website until it reaches 00:00:00 in about three years, but Al’s had his final countdown — and with it, so has environmentalism in general. Who’s going to believe yet another hair shirt environmentalist screeching that “the earth has X years to live,” when its most prominent cultist, the man who once described global warming as “an ecological Kristallnacht,” has just signed his movement’s Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union?

But Al’s got his payout now. All you other global warming zealots — you’re on your own.

(H/T: 5’F)

Related: “50 Reasons Why It Rocks to Be a Progressive in 2013.” — found via Steve Green, who writes, “I’m especially fond of #42, ‘Listen to Green Day albums on your Ipod while drinking Starbucks coffee and seriously complain that corporations are oppressing you.’”

The Goracle can relate to that — in more ways than one.