Johnn Hari (Independent): Gore tells the truth. His enemies smear him

[arenean]

Great article!
Gore tells the truth. His enemies smear him

What is portrayed as a plucky school governor taking on the former vice-president is in fact very different
Published: 15 October 2007

Is anyone else going to watch Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech live, just to check? The last time I celebrated a Gore victory it ended with a Bush hangover that thumped for eight years. So I am expecting the ceremony in Stockholm next month to end with George Bush striding to the podium to announce that the Supreme Court has declared him the world's greatest peacemaker after all, with Gore watching pale-faced in the wings.

Yet there has already been a sour little coda. As news of the Nobel came, it was inevitably paired with a second story: that a British High Court Judge, Mr Justice Burton, had announced that there were nine "errors" in Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth that school-kids had to be warned about when it was shown to them. This verdict was celebrated by global warming deniers across the world as their Scopes Trial, a moment when the judicial system smacked-down science in favour of their dogmas.

This is part of a squalid process that has been going on for more than a decade now – the smearing of Al Gore, simply for telling the truth. I looked back over the American reports of the 2000 election this week, as George Bush was vetoing the extension of healthcare to poor children. "He's gone from being Richard Nixon to Monty Burns," John Stewart noted. Yet Bush was presented then as a "compassionate conservative" who you'd wanna have a beer with. Gore was presented as a prissy, effeminate asshole, and he was relentlessly mocked for, like, knowing stuff about science and the Middle East and other nerd-speak.
<more>