Walter Russell Meade's latest is entitled The Failure of Al Gore: Part One. Part One? Really? This calm, measured essay utterly destroys any credibility the Goracle had and leaves him a wretched, quivering mass of inconsequential protoplasm, something from which one quickly looks away. A Part Two strikes me as completely unnecessary. Although I look forward to it with pleasure; I can be somewhat mean-spirited at times, and besides, Meade's wordsmithing is simply a delight.
By all means, read the whole thing. Here's just a smidgeon to whet your appetite:
A fawning establishment press spares the former vice president the vitriol and schadenfreude it pours over the preachers and priests whose personal conduct compromised the core tenets of their mission; Gore is not mocked as others have been. This gentle treatment hurts both Gore and the greens; he does not know just how disabling, how crippling the gap between conduct and message truly is. The greens do not know that his presence as the visible head of the movement helps ensure its political failure.
Consider how Gore looks to the skeptics. The peril is imminent, he says. It is desperate. The hands of the clock point to twelve. The seas rise, the coral dies, the fires burn and the great droughts have already begun. The hounds of Hell have slipped the huntsman’s leash and even now they rush upon us, mouths agape and fangs afoam.
But grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world. He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry. A father of four, he can lecture the world on the perils of overpopulation. Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents.
Marvelous.
(HT: Instapundit)
