Al Gore can't stand debate


New book pushes for government control of free speech and the free press
I will admit that I do not agree with Al Gore. But the thing that bothers me the most is that people are not allowed to debate him. I'm not the only one who has noticed. Emphasis added.

Early coverage of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, has focused on the fact that the book is largely an assault on the Bush administration. But they have glossed over the most significant and alarming theme that Al Gore has taken up: his alleged defense of "reason" includes a justification for government controls over political speech.

Judging from the excerpts of Gore's book published in TIME, his not-so-subtle theme is that reason is being "assaulted" by a free and unfettered debate in the media--and particularly by the fact that Gore has to contend with opposition from the right-leaning media.

Developing a dangerous theme that the left has been toying with for years, Gore says that reason is being suffocated by "media Machiavellis"--that's a veiled reference to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and Bush political advisor Karl Rove, the twin hobgoblins of the left. According to Gore, these puppet-masters take advantage of "the clever use of electronic mass media" to "manipulate the outcome of elections."

Now here's the really ominous part. This "manipulation" is rendering our representative government "illegitimate" because it only has the public's "consent"--he repeatedly puts "consent" in scare quotes, just to emphasize the point that this consent is not, in Al Gore's superior judgment, genuine or legitimate. As he puts it, "the 'consent of the governed' [has become] a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder."

Remember, this is the guy who took a possible few inches of higher ocean from a UN report and multiplied into several feet. I don't trust him, but I certainly distrust any attempt to use the force of law to silence dissent.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - June 1, 2007 at 02:02 PM  Tag


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