With all due respect, the Author is getting confused. He evidently thinks that Hollywood represents America. It doesn't. Gore's Oscar does not mean anything to most of us here in middle America, it's just another sign that Hollywood is out of touch. Gore's arrogance, hypocrisy, and Elitism does mean a lot, tho.

As for Gore being "'right" on " two great overarching questions: the climate crisis and the war in Mesopotamia"... I don't quite know where to begin on this writer, so I' just stick to the basics:

1.) Gore pumps 'Global Warming' - His facts are wrong. He demonizes any disagreement. And he ignores his own strictures for the proletariat. He ignores the history of continuous climate change.

2.) Gore was part of the Clinton team that brought us 9/11 and 10 years of ignoring Saddam. Granted, Clinton was calling the shots, but Gore had no disagreements.

If the Democrats want to lose, please bring Gore on; But if we want a good election, with effective candidates, viable ideas & issues, stick Gore in his mansion (alright, maybe his SUV), turn the Air up, and let him count his coupons.

How on earth did you convince yourself that 9/11 was Clinton's fault?

He was not President when it happened, he did not have anything to do with planning or funding or carrying out the attacks, or the shameful way the FBI and other law enforcement, policy and intelligence groups ignored all the warning signs from May and June of that year up until the last 2 days before the attack itself. And anyway, al-Qaeda predates his terms as President--the majority of their early funding, weapons and CIA-conducted training came from Reagan's and Bush 41's administrations. They saw bin Ladin's fledgling group, his predecessors and other like-minded organizations in the region as convenient proxies to bottle up and grind down the Soviet war machine in Afghanistan. So why don't you blame Reagan, Bush 41 or our current President for 9/11 and al-Qaeda's rise? Or are you blaming Clinton on this because, like you say about Iraq, he "didn't do enough?"

Also, Clinton, rightly or wrongly, pursued sanctions against Iraq, bombed and shot missiles at them, maintained the No-Fly Zone and used diplomacy and the U.N. to limit his access to nuclear weapons and other mass-destruction weapons and his aggression...which, by the way, date back to when he was a key player in Reagan's regional policy and we sold him arms by the billions to help him consolidate power. Those same men later, under Bush 41, attacked Iraq in 1990 but didn't topple Hussein when they had the "chance" to do so--why don't you blame Reagan or Bush for doing nothing about Hussein?

I think you are either unaware of the facts, in which case, you should look into the issues more; or you don't care about the facts, in which case you are simply parroting the lines of the Republican disinformation and propaganda organs: it's all the Democratic Party's fault, never the Republican's. Repeat this, whatever the facts, on every subject, over and over, and people may be suckered in eventually. Foley? Wait, wasn't he a Democrat? Dems are responsible, because...um...because we have Democrats in the House, and they may have known, and didn't speak up...and aren't they always the ones talking about respecting alternative lifestyles? Why don't they respect Foley's 'lifestyle' of trying to seduce teenage boys? De Lay and his corruption? The Dems are responsible because they didn't stop the Republicans from doing the wrong thing.

Seriously, please, please, please stop taking what either side says as true. Look up the facts, in an independent source (Fox News and talk radio do not count) and judge for yourself whose fault these awful deeds really are. Otherwise, you are buying into the kind of propaganda that Goebbels preached and the Soviets also practiced.

Well played, sir. :-)

Sorry, you sound like a Democratic Party Activist, right down to the standard mantra of "Fox news is bad". I don't have time for a point-for-point rebuttal to your response (I would mention that it was well written & respectful - thanks), Consider this, tho:

Your opening assertions was that I was attempting to blame Gore for 9/11 - Re-read or re-focus on my post, please; I said he was part of the Clinton Team; In my view, the most 'blame' for 9/11 can be placed on the Clinton years. Think about it: Planning cycles for 'projects' with long lead times (Learning how to fly a commercial jet) are years in length - NOT decades or months (Prior to Clinton or after Clinton).

I would agree that we should have taken Saddam out in 1991.

If you would re-read my post, you would see that it's goal was to make a critical statement on Gore becoming a Pres candidate due to getting a Nobel Prize. I think that would be a disaster, and in two brief points I stated why. Weak on International terror, and goofy and self serving on Climate change.

Now, I would encourage you to start looking at facts independently. Check the History of things... Question, debate, and write. I view four news channels everyday, including MSNBC (Liberal) to Fox (Conservative). If you are excluding Fox, you are getting only one side. Gotta go to work. Just a few more years to retirement :-).

Good Luck.

well, the name HistoryBuff is on a par with Bush's Clean Air Act or our favorite "fair and balanced news." Good thing middle america has no coastline to be decimated or inundated in the next fifty years . ..

Dear HistoryBuff,

Thanks for the response. I didn't think you were blaming Gore--you made it clear that you weren't. You were blaming Clinton and his administration, which is what I took exception to. Unless one subscribes to the Let It Happen on Purpose or Made It Happen theories of 9/11 (all current forms of which have grave problems, insofar I am aware of them) then blaming any President for the Actions of al-Qaeda is not just. Specifically, singling Clinton out as you did and saying he brought those attacks about is not just. What do you take the causal connection between him and 9/11 to be? Or rather, between his policies and administration and al-Qaeda's horrible and vicious attack on the United States?

Because you're absolutely right, the planning horizon for the attacks clearly predates President Bush and his term in office...which is why any blame I would attach to him would at its most extreme be that he ignored advance warning on purpose, much as Roosevelt is alleged to have done with Pearl Harbor. I don't know if he did or not; I suspect he didn't, though I know for a fact that warnings were sounded by foreign intelligence agencies, some of which even reached the ears of a Minnesota FBI Field Office.

All the assertions I made about bin Ladin, Reagan and Bush 41 are recorded by multiple sources, and I take them as verified (I can make a fuller bibliography and show you my sources, if you are interested.) If you have any solid, well-researched information to the contrary, I'd love to see it. Unfortunately, I don't trust the federal government when asking questions about the behaviors of its various agencies; their track record is...spotty, at best, especially with regards to anything even vaguely related to National Security. In this case, given the CIA's policy of revealing as little information as possible to the public, and very carefully vetting what they do reveal to make sure it doesn't damage the Agency's image...well, waiting for some kind of official confirmation from them that al-Qaeda was among the groups that were trained and funded in the 80's, by the Company, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, may take a long time. As of right now, they categorically deny any involvement, ever, with bin Ladin.

Here's a link to a Time magazine story which covers some of these points:

<link>

As far as where I get my news...mostly from online and print media, and essentially never from the television, except the occasional local news segment--I do watch TV news from time to time to see how they are covering a story, usually after I have looked up the matter online, read American and foreign newspapers, bloggers, Op-Eds from around the globe, etc., etc. I believe all TV News is slanted, and always too brief to get to serious analysis, or really dig into the facts; unless it's a story that groans on far, far too long. Though of course these are almost always celebrity scandals or domestic homicide cases, or both.

However, in my opinion, Fox News is among the worst offenders, if not the worst, not because of its conservative slant, but because, from what I have seen, it distorts the most, ignores the most and too often simply accepts government press releases as Gospel. I am not referring to opinion segments like H&C or the O'Reilly Factor, though I do take exception with those gentlemen as well.

As far as Gore being President...I don't know how he would approach international terrorism. Personally, I favor intelligence and law enforcement approaches; I believe war should always be the last resort, and that we better have some damn good reasons for going. For the record, I was always opposed to the invasion of Iraq, and I think our invasion of Afghanistan was far, far too hasty; I was never satisfied that an armed intervention on that scale would actually serve to make us safer from terrorism, let alone that it was the absolute best way to oppose terrorism. Self-serving on climate change? Yeah, he is getting rich gadflying about it...I haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth," so I cannot debate the merits of that movie, or the science in it. But almost all of the data I have seen, and almost every scientists who's assertions on the subject I have read, make me believe man-made climate change is happening, and accelerating, and may pose a threat to humanity. Or at least, high civilization.

Oh, and I'm not a member of the Democratic Party, though I do try to be an activist--I mean, being an active citizen is the root of democracy. Democracy is all about being involved; and every democracy needs people willing to be critical of it. So I read, and write, and think, and talk, and debate--and always try to keep it civil, even when I am impassioned. Besides, ad hominem attacks are simply bad logic, and never convince anyone of anything, except maybe that the person making them is kind of a jerk.

Good luck getting to retirement!