Celebutards (2 page)

A
T FIRST BLUSH
,
it may appear problematic to include a meditation on the wit and idiocy of Al Gore in a book that also includes a chapter dedicated to Paris Hilton. Gore, after all, served time in the House of Representatives, the United States Senate and as vice president to the Clinton White House. Paris served time.

Gore presided over a panel dedicated to cutting government waste and mismanagement. Paris presided over the Bimbo Summit, populated by vice maniacs Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. She is also blond.

Still, I would argue that Al and Paris have far more in common than is readily apparent at first examination. Both have won fame, fortune and the best possible restaurant tables due to their fawning entrée into that most American of institutions, Hollywood. Both have drawn attention to themselves, while laying claim to worldwide importance, influence, and privilege, while developing an A-list following of think-alike lemmings. Only Gore starred in an Oscar-winning movie, and has an Emmy and a Nobel Peace Prize sitting on his mantle. But Paris is still young.

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., to his namesake father, then a United States representative who would later serve in the Senate, and Pauline LaFon Gore. He split his childhood between Washington and Carthage, Tennessee. With a relatively high IQ (it’s been gauged at between 133 and 134) he quickly grew bored at Harvard and scored at the lower end of his class, before discovering a passion for his father’s business—politics. Switching majors from English to government, he graduated with honors.

Then Gore joined the Army. He served during the Vietnam era, and was shipped to Southeast Asia for about five months, though he has always maintained his vehement opposition to the conflict. After his discharge, he worked for five years as a reporter for the
Nashville Tennessean
for what he called “slightly above slave wages”—though he also benefited handsomely from royalties paid by owners of zinc mines that operated on his family’s Tennessee farm. One thing was certain: Gore would not languish long in journalistic obscurity.

In 1970, he married Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson, known as Tipper. She would flirt solo with her own celebutardom by pushing in the 1980s for parental warnings on records containing dirty lyrics, and also through her self-serving announcement, during the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, that she had gone through a teensy weensy “situational depression”—but got all better.

Gore was enrolled in law school at Vanderbilt University in 1976 when he quit to run for a seat in the House of Representatives. He won. And thus, a political career was born, one that would occupy his days for more than two decades, until it was abruptly cut short by a crushing defeat that sent Gore into a tailspin of disappointment and self-pity. And put him on a quest to, once again, feel relevant.

But first, Gore’s life took another turn. On April 3, 1989, his six-year-old son, Albert, was nearly killed in a car crash while leaving the Baltimore Orioles’ opening day game. As Little Albert convalesced, Big Albert started writing his book,
Earth in the Balance,
about environmental conservation. This tome became the first book written by a Senator to make The
New York Times
best seller list since John F. Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage.
It also provided Al Gore with a nifty subject around which to build his second act.

How different Gore’s life would have turned out were it not for a close election, the Sunshine State, and a president named Bush. How different for us all.

The 2000 race was said to be Gore’s to lose, and he did lose it, in wild fashion. The election pitted the popular Gore against the popular Texas Governor George W. Bush. But Gore miscalculated when he declined to procure the advice, counsel and star wattage of Bill Clinton, who remained wildly popular in spite of—or because of—his Oval Office affair with an intern named Monica Lewinsky. Gore thought he was better off going it alone than saddled with his undisciplined former boss. Gore would never again so badly underestimate the intelligence of the American people.

If the 2000 vote was close on a national level, in Florida, as Dan Rather would say in the throes of election night aneurysm: “This race is tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach.” Election Day came and went, with no clear winner in Florida. Hanging in the balance were the state’s twenty-five electoral votes, without which a candidate could not take the whole enchilada. The country waited.

Hand recounts were ordered in a few heavily Democratic counties in the southeastern part of the state. Poll workers examined individual ballots under magnifying glasses, trying to divine “voter intent.” And so, we all learned more than we ever needed to know about chads—those tiny bits of paper that are punched out of paper ballots. We learned about hanging chads (nibs that are incompletely punched out of ballots) and pregnant ones (chads that are pushed in the middle, but not torn out). Evidently, Florida stands alone on the planet as the place where one may be a little bit pregnant.

The election was finally decided by the United States Supreme Court, which ended the legal bickering and allowed Florida, finally, to certify its vote. Bush won the state by just 534 votes, out of 5.8 million cast, barely enough to take a high school election. On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. He was only the fourth man in history to lose the popular vote—by more than a half million—but win the Electoral College, and therefore the election.

But his victory would be cemented four years later. In 2004, with the Florida fiasco still fresh in voters’ minds, more than 55 percent of the American electorate turned out to vote, compared with just over 51 percent in 2000. This time, Bush won a decisive majority over Democrat John Kerry. The voters had spoken, but the Democrats didn’t really want to hear.

The stinging 2000 loss hit Gore hard. For the first time in his adult life, he was out of a job. He would make up for it by transcending politics and appealing to his natural celebrity base to grasp more fame and power than he might have received had he been elected president.

When he was vice president, Gore was in charge of “Reinventing Government.” This brought him a spot on
The Late Show With David Letterman
in 1993, in which Gore, who’d unearthed federal regulations for smashing an ashtray—it “should break into a small number of irregular shaped pieces, not greater in number than 35”—tried to break an ashtray according to government code. Gore had a reputation for being a stuffed shirt, but he clearly reveled in the
Late Show
applause. Still, there exists little star power in ashtrays, or in Gore’s dubious claim to having brought about the digital age. To succeed in this game, Al Gore would reach higher.

And he did. Gore emerged into the public consciousness in spectacular fashion in 2006, starring in the global warming documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
—a glitzy manifesto about the dangers of climate change. It had all the drama and pacing of a Hollywood horror flick, capable of scaring the bejeezus out of small children and senior citizens. It also promoted a view of global warming that was deeply, alarmingly, and exploitatively flawed.

But facts held little sway to burgeoning legions of Gore disciples, to whom the warming of the planet was not a matter of science, nor of politics, but something akin to religion.

“My fellow Americans, people all over the world,” Gore said onstage at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, in February 2007, as
An Inconvenient Truth
won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. “We need to solve the climate crisis. It’s not a political issue; it’s a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act.”

Apparently one should do as Gore says, not as he does. While Gore was sermonizing about energy conservation, his Nashville estate was drinking electricity and natural gas at a rate of twenty times the national average—burning through nearly 221,000 kilowatt hours per year, compared to a national average of 10,656, according to Nashville Electric Service records unearthed by the Tennessee Center for Policy Reseacrch.

An Inconvenient Truth
is jam-packed with the type of Tinseltown fear-mongering capable of keeping one awake at night—huge increases in sea levels, melting ice sheets, rampant tropical diseases, and hurricanes that make the twister in
The Wizard of Oz
look like a gentle breeze. I have no interest in venturing an opinion here as to whether climate change actually exists, but rather to throw a little cold water on some of Gore’s most outlandish claims.

First, it is fact, inconvenient as it may be, that the Arctic was as warm or warmer than it is today in 1940. Further, there is evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of atmospheric sciences Richard S. Lindzen wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
, many glaciers stopped retreating in about 1970, and some are now advancing again. And, while hurricanes have been blamed on global warming by the Gore crowd, scientists won’t attribute any particular hurricane to the change in climate.

Yes, Dr. Lindzen agrees, the planet is warmer. The scientific community has pretty much agreed since 1988 that the earth is one degree Fahrenheit hotter than it was a century ago. But temperatures have remained flat since 1998. And those greenhouse gases? No question they’ve increased in the atmosphere. But their impact on warming is theoretical, and scientists are left scratching their heads as to why the world isn’t warmer than it is.

Furthermore, Gore disciples are passionate that global cooking is a distinctly American problem, solvable only by the United States making sacrifices that polluted bastions like China, whose coal-fired ovens spew filth into the heavens, should not be required to make. Never discussed are the gains in economics, education and standard of living made by developing nations that adopt modern technology, and therefore increase pollution. And don’t expect Al Gore to stop jetting across the globe to make speeches and retrieve prizes. Some sacrifices, I suppose, are too great to expect.

Gore picked up an Emmy award for the interactive cable and satellite channel he launched aimed at youth, Current TV, as well as for his work on global warming. Yes, 2007 was shaping up as a very good year.

But perhaps the biggest blow to Gore’s fantasies of being elected global savior was dealt by a British judge in October 2007. A father had requested that High Court Judge Michael Burton pull Gore’s movie from schools because it contained, as the dad put it, “serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush.” Judge Burton refused to ban the film outright, but he decreed that the movie should only be shown in British schools along with guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination.

The judge determined that the film contained nine fatal errors. They are:

Error No. 1:
Gore asserted that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice sheets “in the near future.”

Judge’s response:
“This [is] distinctly alarmist” and will only occur “after, and over, millennia.”

Error No. 2:
Low-lying Pacific atolls have already been evacuated.

Judge:
There is no evidence of an evacuation having happened.

Error No. 3:
The Gulf Stream, which warms up the Atlantic Ocean, would shut down.

Judge:
It was “very unlikely” it would shut down in the future, though it might slow down.

Error No. 4:
Graphs showing a rise in CO
₂
and the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years showed “an exact fit.”

Judge:
A connection exists, but “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”

Error No. 5:
The disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro is due to global warming.

Judge:
It cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mount Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

Error No. 6:
The drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming.

Judge:
Insufficient evidence exists to establish the exact cause.

Error No. 7:
Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming.

Judge: There is “insufficient evidence to show that.”

Error No. 8:
This one is my personal favorite: Gore claimed polar bears were being found that had drowned “swimming long distances—up to 60 miles—to find the ice.”

Judge:
Only four bears have been found drowned, and because of a storm.

Error No. 9:
Coral reefs were bleaching because of global warming and other factors.

Judge:
Separating the impact of stresses due to climate change from other stresses faced by the reefs, such as over-fishing and pollution, was difficult.

This ruling, however, failed to prevent the brain trust in Oslo from awarding Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize—a prestigious award that in recent years went to President Jimmy Carter, as well as Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, thief to his people, and terrorist leader, Yasser Arafat.

Splitting the prize between Gore and the UN panel struck some as odd because the two institutions do not see eye-to-eye on climate change.