Al Gore Assaults Reason

I went to Costco today to pick up more vitamins, and naturally I cruised the movie and book section because I can't resist.

Al Gore has a new book out, and when I read the title, I snorted. Out loud in Costco. The Assault on Reason.

What nerve! What chutzpah! What unmitigated arrogance for him to believe that he's got the inside scoop on reason! It's absolutely snortworthy.

After searching the internet for someone who had the courage to pick up the thing and read it, I found this review by Robert Tracinski at Real Clear Politics. He must have really enjoyed it, because he had this to say:

Early coverage of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, has focused on the fact that the book is largely an assault on the Bush administration. But they have glossed over the most significant and alarming theme that Al Gore has taken up: his alleged defense of "reason" includes a justification for government controls over political speech.

Judging from the excerpts of Gore's book published in TIME, his not-so-subtle theme is that reason is being "assaulted" by a free and unfettered debate in the media--and particularly by the fact that Gore has to contend with opposition from the right-leaning media.

Developing a dangerous theme that the left has been toying with for years, Gore says that reason is being suffocated by "media Machiavellis"--that's a veiled reference to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and Bush political advisor Karl Rove, the twin hobgoblins of the left. According to Gore, these puppet-masters take advantage of "the clever use of electronic mass media" to "manipulate the outcome of elections."

Now here's the really ominous part. This "manipulation" is rendering our representative government "illegitimate" because it only has the public's "consent"--he repeatedly puts "consent" in scare quotes, just to emphasize the point that this consent is not, in Al Gore's superior judgment, genuine or legitimate.

His basic theme seems to be: if the left isn't winning in the marketplace of ideas, there can't possibly be anything wrong with their ideas. It must be the marketplace itself that is "broken," and the left needs to use the power of government to fix it--in both senses of the word "fix."

It's good to know that the world is the way I left it when I stopped this week to study. Al Gore is still cluelessly cranking out propaganda that he thinks will redeem his standing in the world and regain for him a renewed shot at the White House. He's dreaming, of course.

One can only look back nostalgically at the days when mental hospitals also held delusional people and not just the criminally insane. There would have been a nice place for him there at Happy Acres.