Al Gore Is Far Too Stupid To Listen To

So Al Gore has a new book out called "The Assault on Reason," which is basically a book that claims that if you disagree with Gore, then you are abandoning reason and logic.

He must be listening to Janeane Garofalo too much.

And I am not exaggerating. His claims on Olbermann tonight were just amazing. At the same time he is attacking a lack of logic and reason in our public debate, he says that one of the results of the lack of respect for facts is "climate crisis [mistakes]." Al Gore himself has pushed many lies about climate change, and because we are not convinced by his lies, we are making a "mistake" due to a lack of respect for "facts."

He had more examples, including -- incredibly -- "eliminating the prohibition against torture." Except for the fact that there was no elimination of the prohibition against torture, and in fact, the prohibition against torture was reaffirmed under Bush.

So who isn't respecting the facts, Mr. Vice President?

And he actually claimed this whopper:

I think that our public airwaves, and more importantly the national conversation of democracy, if you will, now is dominated by elements that were not features of the conversation that our Founders expected that we would have, and a lot of the public forum is taken up not just with trivialities, but also with very cleverly constructed propagandistic mesasging that really doesn't take logic and reason into account.

There was never a Golden Age whene everything was all logical in the past, of course not, but the relative role of facts and logic and reason used to be much larger than it has become in the age of 30-second TV ads and the multi-screen experience.

Not expected? Hell, the Founders themselves passed the Sedition Act in a misguided attempt to deal with the very same "features of the conversation."

Indeed, throughout the 1790s, almost every newspaper was affiliated directly with one or the other political party. It was Vice President Thomas Jefferson who hired a scandalmonger to print lies about President John Adams.

Bill O'Reilly isn't unique, anymore than Benjamin Franklin-Bache was. We have Ann Coulter, they had Thomas Paine. We have Michael Moore, they had James Callendar.

There's nothing new under the sun, and it's shocking that Al Gore would actually think that our discourse wasn't dominated by "propaganda" at any time in our history.

OK, it's not that shocking.