Big Al’s Nobel Triumph

By: Dr. Leonard Carrier, DI’s In-house
Historian and Philosopher

10 12 07

            Al Gore has done it.  He and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.  Instead of concentrating on politics as usual after the Supreme Court snatched the Presidency from him in the election of 2000, Big Al devoted his efforts to traveling the world and broadcasting the reality of climate change with his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth”.  Up until today, what was his reward for such selfless behavior?  It was a howl of protest from the usual suspects, that band of flying monkeys who serve to protect the right-wing corporate structure, the profits of which rely on polluting the atmosphere with fossil fuels.  Immediately, a host of paid corporate lackeys posing as scientists set out to debunk Al’s findings and those of the IPCC.  This is what the reactionary right loves to do.  They scour the earth for “skeptics” to come forward and offer statistics attempting to disprove, not only what the great majority of climate change experts have concluded, but also what people can observe with their own eyes.  The polar ice caps are melting, the earth is getting warmer, polar bears are drowning, people are dying from heat exhaustion, and human activity is contributing to this result.  What the skeptics are being hired to do is to gain time for the corporate structure to reposition itself to reality, throwing up a smokescreen so that corporations can still make a profit while retooling themselves for the future.

            Is this evaluation too harsh?  Not if we remember what the right-wing journalistic mercenaries said about Al Gore five years ago.  On September 23, 2002, Gore gave a speech in San Francisco warning the Bush Administration about the folly of invading Iraq.  With the Administration bent on war, and public opinion up for grabs, we got immediate reaction to Gore’s speech by the Washington Post’s Michael Kelly, who characterized Gore’s speech with such terms as ‘dishonest’, ‘obvious lies’, ‘wretched’, ‘vile’, and ‘contemptible’.  Fortunately, Mr. Kelly is no longer with us; having been killed as an embedded reporter in the country he cheer-led an invasion for.  Poetic justice, I would say.  Then there was the reaction of the right-wing journalist, Charles Krauthammer—crippled in body, crippled in mind—who called Gore’s speech a disgrace, a pudding with no theme but much poison, and a series of cheap shots.  One can always depend on Krauthammer to attack anyone who doesn’t agree with his extreme reactionary views.  Finally, there was William Bennett, the former college footballer and later the Las Vegas gambler extraordinaire, whom someone accurately described as having played too many downs without a helmet.  According to Bennett, Gore’s stand against invading Iraq banished himself from public opinion and was thereby an act of political suicide.  Are these so-called pundits ready to eat their words and say that they were wrong and Gore was right?  Well, Mr. Kelly is only capable of eating dirt now, but the rest of them have convenient memories, and so they, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, would never admit to having made a mistake—especially a mistake that has led to the deaths of nearly 4,000 American troops and more than a million Iraqis.

            So, what will these reactionary marionettes say now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize?  Don’t expect them to say anything nice.  If anything, they will redouble their efforts to discredit Big Al, especially since he has shown them to blind seers on many occasions since 2002.  But we already know what rotten prognosticators the sleazy crowd on NewsMax and Fox News have been.  Why should we expect them to say anything truthful about Al Gore at this stage?

            As for Big Al himself, he has graciously accepted the honor bestowed upon him, with words of praise for the scientists at the IPCC.  Unlike his fascist-leaning critics, he refuses to turn his prize into a political victory, saying that climate is not a political issue, but it is a moral and spiritual challenge.  To put his money where his mouth is, Gore is giving 100% of his prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bi-partisan, nonprofit organization devoted to making the public aware of the urgency of the climate crisis.  So congratulations, Big Al, you stand head and shoulders above your narrow-minded critics.  But shed a tear for us, who could have had you as President in 2000 but for the whim of our Supreme Court, and for the past seven years have had to suffer the boneheaded stupidity that oozes daily from the White House.