AlGore's assault on reason in book form

Thomas Mitchell:

You have to give Al Gore credit for one thing: Truth in labeling.

His new book, "The Assault on Reason," is precisely that -- a relentless assault on reason, as well as science, history, Republicans, news media, the president, corporations, the wealthy and any ignoramuses who do not fall in line with his soft-core socialist friends.

It is a 320-page daisy-chain of platitudes, sophomoric clichés punctuated by vaguely relevant quotations ripped straight from the pages of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" and smatterings of pseudoscientific citations to prop up lame contentions.

The former veep makes sweeping generalities such as "hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake." Reminds one of the liberal journalist who was shocked Richard Nixon got elected because she didn't know anyone who had voted for him. That's what you get when you surround yourself with sequacious lefties.

...

His grasp of history is a bit slippery, too. "It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did," Gore writes. "In spite of the dangers they confronted, they faithfully protected our freedoms."

Yep, our ancestors faithfully protected freedom with the Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus, jailing of people who argued the draft violated the 13th Amendment, Japanese internment, the Smith Act and various red scares and blacklistings.

The man sees the world through a liberal prism that distorts reality. He actually says -- despite the liberal editorial pages of most newspapers, the left-leaning broadcast and cable networks other than Fox -- that the administration has developed a "highly effective propaganda machine" to embed certain mythologies.

"This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and 'reporters' -- call it the Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge axis," Gore declares. "This fifth column in the fourth estate is made up of propagandists pretending to be journalists."

This axis of evil is force-feeding right-wing talking points, according to Gore. And I thought people voluntarily tuned in and clicked on. Of course, he laments the demise of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan, because that denies his ilk the ability to force-feed their brand of talking points.

In a chapter called "The Politics of Wealth," the man whose family wealth springs from oil and tobacco concludes simplistically and without a shred of evidence, "Greed and wealth now allocate power in our society ..."

Perhaps the funniest part of the book is the psychoblather from the apostle of the gospel that global warming is an irrefutable scientific fact. He cites something called "attachment theory," which postulates that children not properly nurtured socially become sociopaths, and tries to make it a metaphor for society.

Then he prattles on about vicarious trauma, how our brains are hard-wired for the constant motion provided by television and how television makes us more prone to fear. This sets up a bizarre segue into a tale about how as a boy he hypnotized chickens by circling his finger around their heads.

You could use the hypnotized chicken as a doorstop, he explains, but not as a football. "Something about being thrown through the air seemed to wake the chicken right up."

I am grateful that Mitchell read this mess so I don't have to. Somehow, I don't think throwing AlGore through the air would bring him back to the real reality as opposed to the alternate universe of the left in which he now resides. Mitchell's reading of this book suggest that AlGore is really not very smart and that AlGore is really upset with those who point it out.