Top 10 Inconvenient Truths About Al Gore

Top 10 Inconvenient Truths About Al Gore
by Human Events 10/01/2011

Throughout his career, Al Gore has shamelessly exploited the public, piously preaching his liberal screed while taking hypocritical steps that have enriched him politically and financially. Here are the Top 10 Inconvenient Truths About Al Gore.

1. Bogus truth: Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth documentary on global warming garnered him a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award, but it was filled with factual errors. A British judge, in a case challenging the use of the documentary in the school system, ruled that there were nine scientific errors in the film, such as blaming Hurricane Katrina on global warming and erroneously stating that polar bears were dying. The Science and Public Policy Institute found 35 errors in the documentary. Yet governments around the world were expected to curtail economic growth due to the “settled science” of global warming.

2. Cashing in on climate alarmism: Just when global-warming concern reached its peak, Gore was first in line to cash in. Gore founded the nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection, which spent hundreds of millions on a climate-change ad campaign to build support for green ventures. Then, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a venture capital firm at which Gore is a partner, invested more than a billion dollars in a myriad of green enterprises that would have benefited from the cap-and-trade energy policy that died in the Senate.

3. Political hypocrisy: His role in the 2000 presidential election recount remains among the most brazenly cynical political acts in U.S. history. While demanding “all votes must be counted,” Gore’s lawyers only sought recounts in the three counties most likely to add votes to his column, and actually sought to prevent the tallying of all the military ballots from overseas.

4. Environmental hypocrisy: For all of his preaching about saving the planet, Gore plays the environment when it suits his selfish desires. For example, Gore once had a toxic-waste dump at the family property in Carthage, Tenn. And during his 2000 election run, floodgates were opened in New Hampshire to provide for a better photo-op for his canoe ride down a river. Not to mention that his personal electric bill could light a village.

5. Shamelessly uses family for politics: Gore has given tearful, prime-time political speeches about his son’s serious accident and his sister’s cancer death (despite profiting from his family’s tobacco farming). He exaggerated his mother’s drug costs during a presidential debate. And his sloppy kiss with Tipper at the 2000 Democratic convention was pure political theater.

6. Misuses religion for politics: The Left’s aversion to mixing church and state doesn’t apply when religion can be used to score a political point. In 1997, Vice President Gore spoke at a press conference at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, giving a new twist to the Christmas story. “Speaking from my own religious tradition in this Christmas season, 2,000 years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child in a manger because the inn was full,” he said, apparently oblivious to the story that Mary and Joseph were travelers, not homeless.

7. Buddhist bathroom break: With all the squawking on the Left about money corrupting politics, let’s recall the lame defense offered by Albert Arnold Gore Jr. when he was caught at a Democratic fund-raiser held at a Buddhist temple, violating the group’s tax-exempt status. Gore told a Senate panel investigating the illegal fund-raising, “I didn't realize I was in a Buddhist temple.” And he told the FBI he missed fund-raising discussions at the event because he “drank a lot of iced tea during meetings, which could have necessitated a restroom break.”

8. Job-killing policies: While Gore is still insisting that green jobs—building solar and wind facilities—will save the economy, the Solyndra debacle put a stake in that dream. And now he is trying to kill a real job creator, the construction of a pipeline from Alberta, Canada, which would carry oil to the Gulf of Mexico.

9. Plays the race card: With the public increasingly rejecting global-warming alarmism, Gore equated the critics to racists. In an interview with the Climate Reality Project, Gore said, “There came a time when friends or people you work with … when racist comments would come up in the conversation, and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man, why do you talk that way? I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that, so don’t talk that way around me.’ … That happened in millions of conversations, and slowly the conversation was won. We have to win the conversation on climate.”

10. Blunders galore: No wonder Gore left politics after his 2000 defeat, as he quickly became a punch line for comics. From his bizarre exaggerations—saying he invented the Internet and was the inspiration for the main character in Love Story—to his outright verbal gaffes—mistranslating e pluribus unum—to his heavy breathing at a presidential debate, the fellow is one weird dude.
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