by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n A<\/span>l Gore embodies a type that usually turns up in high school or university faculties, what we can call the evangelical liberal. These folks believe they have received the revealed truth about everything, and so are entitled to hector and harass the rest of us with blustering sermons whose real purpose is to demonstrate their righteousness and superiority. What is worse, their revealed truth does not come from God or a traditional faith, but supposedly from a rational examination of principle and empirical evidence. Thus they combine the worst traits of religious fanaticism and crackpot scientism.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no accident that most of these people are also well off. I suspect that their conspicuous display of sensitivity to the plight of the downtrodden victims of oppression functions as camouflage for their own privilege. Remember, the liberal-leftist is supposed to be on the side of the \u201clittle guy\u201d against the fat-cat plutocrats. Private jets and 30,000 square foot mansions are hard to reconcile with populist bluster about income inequality, excessive consumption, and corporate carbon footprints. And since the mainstream media and Hollywood are filled with the same types, this hypocrisy is seldom examined by the liberal media or made into predictable cinematic melodramas like those excoriating corporate \u201cgreed.\u201d<\/p>\n So back in the day Al Gore was something of a crank. After all, he wasn\u2019t as annoying and pernicious as another of this type, Jimmy Carter. And Gore\u2019s environmentalism, as laid out in his 1992 book\u00a0Earth in the Balance<\/i>, was and still is nothing more than a tissue of worn-out Romantic clich\u00e9s, bad intellectual history, and vaguely socialist complaints about industrial capitalism and the horrible life it has inflicted on us unfortunates, the sort of stuff one hears from a TA in a freshman English course. Gore\u2019s prose is filled with sentimental embarrassments: he gushes like a schoolgirl over the \u201cvividness, vibrancy, and aliveness of the rest of the natural world,\u201d the \u201cdeeper rhythms of life,\u201d the \u201cnatural harmony that entails the music of life,\u201d the \u201cawe, wonder, a sense of mystery \u2014 a spiritual response \u2014 when one reflects on [nature\u2019s] deeper meaning.\u201d These bromides sound like the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century nature-love Flaubert satirized 150 years ago in\u00a0Madame Bovary<\/i>\u00a0(\u201cAnd doesn\u2019t it seem to you,\u201d Emma Bovary enthuses about the sea to her seducer Leon, \u201cthat the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, of which the contemplation elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?\u201d).<\/p>\n Then came 2000, the \u201cstolen\u201d election, and the Bush administration\u2019s subsequent rejection of the ludicrous Kyoto treaty. Now Gore\u2019s wounded ego, his hatred of George Bush, and his romantic environmentalism all found the perfect public issue in global warming. It didn\u2019t matter that Kyoto under President Gore would not have been ratified in the Senate, or that even if ratified it wouldn\u2019t have made much difference in terms of reducing emissions enough to lower global temperatures. Kyoto became the perfect expression of irrational bigotry and hatred: against George Bush, against America, against the modern world and the technology that insulates us from nature\u2019s brutal indifference and allows us to live like gods compared to previous generations. Moreover, these same prejudices dominate the media, the universities, and the EUrocrats beloved of blue-state America, insuring that Gore would have a sympathetic audience both at home and abroad.<\/p>\n So now Gore, previously in the news only for growing a beard or a gut, had an issue that allowed him more loudly to indulge his self-selected role as prophet, something he admitted to in\u00a0Earth in the Balance<\/i>: there he wrote that his purpose is \u201cto fully search my heart and mind about this challenge to which I feel called \u2014 and in the process to summon the courage to make a full and unreserved commitment to see it through.\u201d The rhetoric of evangelical Christianity is obvious. One wonders, though, how much \u201ccourage\u201d it takes for a multi-millionaire and out-of-work politician to preach to a media choir that already shares many of the same prejudices and bigotries indulged by Gore. Seasoned with Bush hatred, Gore\u2019s cinematic rants on global warming were a shoo-in for an Academy Award voted on by a cohort not exactly known for critical thinking skills, educational achievement, or even the ability to distinguish fact from fiction, as proven by the \u201cdocumentary\u201d award given to Michael Moore\u2019s fictive pastiche\u00a0Bowling for Columbine<\/i>.<\/p>\n And now has come the global imprimatur of Western self-loathing, Bush hatred, and anti-Americanism, the Orwellian named Nobel Peace Prize. Jimmy Carter, who hasn\u2019t met a dictator whose boots he won\u2019t lick, got his in 2002 during the run-up to the Iraq war, right after he scolded the President as a warmonger. Mohammed El Baradei \u2014 he of the impotent International Atomic Energy Agency, another Bush-scolder whose \u201cdiplomacy\u201d has accomplished nothing other than giving the Iranian mullahs more time to get the bomb \u2014 got one too in 2005. Then there\u2019s the literature Nobel awarded that same year to rabid lunatic Harold Pinter, whose anti-Americanism makes Iran\u2019s Ahmadenijad sound like a Republican Rotarian on the fourth of July. And let\u2019s not forget the most shameless Nobel of all, the one given in 1994 to Yasser Arafat, the corrupt thug with Israeli, American, European, and Arab blood up to his elbows. How anyone could feel proud being in that company defies comprehension.<\/p>\n This is Gore\u2019s \u201cvindication\u201d the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0announced? This tainted prize used to express old Europe\u2019s envy and hatred of the America that refuses to flagellate itself and defer to the supposed superior wisdom and cultural sophistication of an exhausted civilization? But here\u2019s the worst: now we\u2019re guaranteed even more of Gore\u2019s narcissistic bluster, preening self-righteousness, and gaseous apocalyptic sermons. Isn\u2019t Jimmy Carter enough punishment?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a92007 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Al Gore’s evangelical liberalism reconsidered. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Al Gore embodies a type that usually turns up in high school or university faculties, what we can call the evangelical liberal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,753],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1po","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":396,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-nobel-committee-and-its-orwellian-peace-prize\/","url_meta":{"origin":5418,"position":0},"title":"The Nobel Committee and Its Orwellian Peace Prize","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine Norway\u2019s Nobel Committee added yet another absurd pick to its long list of politicized and shameful Peace Prize awards. Giving the prize to the disintegrating European Union is not as despicable as giving it to the bloodstained terrorist Yasser Arafat, or as laughably naive as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6606,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bruce-thornton-on-secure-freedom-radio-with-frank-gaffney\/","url_meta":{"origin":5418,"position":1},"title":"Bruce Thornton on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Seth Jones, Bruce Thornton, Peter Pham, Diana West October 9th, 2013\u00a0\u00b7\u00a0Comments SETH JONES, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, joins guest host DAN BONGINO, to help explain the terror threat from and historical background of the terrorist organization al-Shabaab. BRUCE THORNTON, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11722,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-nevertrump-bitter-enders\/","url_meta":{"origin":5418,"position":2},"title":"The NeverTrump Bitter Enders","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 17, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Bruce Thornton \/\/ Front Page Magazine As Trump enters his third year of office, some Republican NeverTrumpers have gotten control of the symptoms of Trumpophobia, and have settled for the occasional snarky asides to maintain their anti-Trump bona fides while they write about serious issues rather than Trump\u2019s alleged crypto-fascist\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2214,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-the-prize-and-political-theater\/","url_meta":{"origin":5418,"position":3},"title":"Obama, the Prize and Political Theater","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Giving Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, after a mere nine months in office and no foreign policy achievements whatsoever, confirms that the prize is a bit of political theater in which those Americans who put the world\u2019s interests ahead of their own country\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1004,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wars-of-religion\/","url_meta":{"origin":5418,"position":4},"title":"Wars of Religion","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 30, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com This holiday season we have pretty much been spared the usual peevish cranks campaigning against any public celebration of Christmas. The attacks on public cr\u00e8ches, school pageants, Christmas music, and even the greeting \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d have been few this year. Yet we shouldn\u2019t think that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5498,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/third-worldism-what-does-africa-need\/","url_meta":{"origin":5418,"position":5},"title":"Third-Worldism: What Does Africa Need?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers I\u00a0hate to use a clich\u00e9, but \u201cbleeding-heart liberal\u201d is just too accurate not to use. I suspect the phrase derives from those depictions of Jesus Christ with his exposed heart wrapped in thorns and dripping blood. This image nails the egocentric, self-righteous exhibitionism of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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