The Zong

The Gore Watch ™ is heating up, and I’m here to tell you that there are a lot of folks who are unhappy about it. It must be some kind of liberal conspiracy, like that whole global warming thing, because A-Gor has been nominated for a shit-ton of awards recently, including an Oscar and the frigging Nobel Peace Prize, not to mention the oh-so-coveted Prince of Asturias award over in Spain, whatever the hell that is.

I’ll say this much: the man hasn’t even said if he’s gonna run yet, but the Gore-bashing has commenced already in earnest. Conservative writers everywhere are saying some unkind stuff about him, because all of a sudden they’re scared shitless that he actually might run. I mean, if you thought he was dangerous to the GOP before, think about how hard it would be to vote against him if he has an effing Nobel Peace Prize in his pocket.

And so we’re getting stuff like this, written by a God-fearing, pants-shitting conservative named Doug Patton:

A recent “Wall Street Journal” article quotes a United Nations study that estimates Gore’s solutions for supposed manmade climate change would cost a staggering $553 trillion over the next century. That means that every man, woman and child on planet earth would be 30 percent poorer in the year 2100.

This is pretty rich, just sitting here and reading this. I mean, really look at that last sentence and think for a minute what kind of mind can produce something like that. Then again, if his math is “accurate,” then I guess he has a point. I’ll be 123 years old in 2100, and I’ll bet I’ll really miss that extra cash that Al Gore wants to flush down the toilet.

Most meteorologists know they can’t give us an accurate forecast beyond next week. Yet Al Gore and his cadre of “scientists” can tell us what’s going to happen fifty years from now? Please.

Can we start keeping a tally of how many conservatives put quotes around “scientists” when talking about global warming? The way they do it, you’d think Al Gore hired a bunch of carnies to dress up in white jackets and point at pictures of hurricanes and melting icebergs. If you’re gonna put quotes around it, let’s make it clear who these “scientists” really are. Could they be “the leading international network of climate scientists,” or are they maybe “the hundreds of scientists who’ve had their findings supressed by the Bush Administration“?

I don’t know why conservatives are so fucking scared of climate change, but I’ll tell you something: I wrote a paper on global warming in the 9th grade (that was about 14 years ago) and even way back then there really didn’t seem to be much of a debate about it among the scientific community other than how we might be able to slow it down, and so now I really think these dickheads are lying through their teeth when they keep suggesting that climate change (which many of them denied even existed until recently) is due to natural processes like cows farting or driving cars.

Also, did Doug Patton really just suggest that because meteorologists can’t predict next week’s weather accurately, then we can’t be sure that climate change is happening? Yup, I just read it back. He totally did, that cheeky mouth-breather.

If you look around the internet at what is being written by conservative bloggers and wannabe journalists, you’ll see that there is an absolute glut of this kind of bullshit out there right now, some calling Gore’s movie “propaganda” and calling climate change a “hoax” and so on. All the while, I can feel Al Gore getting stronger (and possibly thinner), and the call for his candidacy is reaching a fever pitch. Someone get me a t-shirt that says “Gore-Obama ‘08” goddamit!

Alas, even with all this stuff flying around, the only stuff I can find about Al’s actual plans is in the frigging gossip columns.

Laurie David, the producer who pushed to turn Mr. Gore’s global-warming slide show into a movie, said she had written checks to Senators Clinton and Obama. But she said she was hoping that her film’s star might be enticed into another run.

“Gore-Obama would be a pretty great ticket, don’t you think?” she said. “I’ve told him that many times,” she said of Mr. Gore, “and he always pretends that his cellphone isn’t working.”

It’s a shame he isn’t picking up his phone, because the Democrats called, and they want their goddamn spines back.

- M.G.