Years ago I stopped my subscription to The Nation because I couldn’t stand their choice of resident bad boy writer. I remember thinking to myself, “I’m not going to continue paying good money for this guy’s….”
Yet, like any number of media favourites, he still pops up from time to time (you know, a book here, an article there, the occasional cable television appearance with those lovely perks in the green room). One of his latest mud pies appeared September 24th in Slate:
….Apart from the awards, not only could Gore claim that he had been a fairly effective senator and a reasonably competent vice president, he could also present himself in zeitgeist terms as the candidate who was on the right side of the two great overarching questions: the climate crisis and the war in Mesopotamia. Should I add that, whether or not he really won the Electoral College in 2000, he did manage to collect the majority of the popular vote? Several people, some of them well-informed, have been saying to me that Gore will wait until the Nobel committee’s announcement before he makes up his mind. Should he make up his mind to run, he could alter the entire equation….
Except, that wasn’t always his tune.
Not a fan of consistency, eh? Or is it that nothing fails like the current administration’s failure?
June 7, 2004:
Hitchens’s two cents: Gore “nuts”
Author Christopher Hitchens joined the chorus of right-wing pundits purporting to diagnose former Vice President Al Gore’s psychiatric state following Gore’s May 26 speech about U.S. policy in Iraq. Hitchens, appearing on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country on June 3, said, “Al Gore’s been making speeches that make him look and sound completely nuts.”
February 11, 2003:
….And I’m very glad that Nader stayed in to the end, because he hurt Al Gore’s chances of winning….
….Al Gore had allowed himself to become a humble, hollowed-out, humiliated figure. I didn’t want a zombie to be the president of the United States….
July 13, 2000:
….It is as possible, in theory as well as practice, to imagine Gore making a safe and stupid reactionary appointment as it is to picture Bush making an “unpredictable” centrist one….
Hmmm. Roberts and Alito. How’d that work out for you Chris?
January 20, 2002
….And not many people wish that Al Gore and his team had been on the bridge four months ago….
If they didn’t then, they sure do now.
September/October 2000
….Indeed, the very thing about Clinton that endeared him to some liberals — the fierce hatred he aroused on the right (whose famous “coup” would have made Al Gore president in 1999, probably his best chance) — was exactly what made him so toxic….