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Monday, February 05, 2007

Trust Al Gore? 



So, Gore is at unbackable odds to follow in the footsteps of Michael Moore to the Oscar podium.

He may even win the Nobel Prize. Presumably, he could win votes there from some of the same Europeans who gave the once-prestigious Nobel Peace gong to Jimmy Carter, apparently because doing so served "US and A weeth a leetle keeck in ze shins", or something to that effect.

Reactions to An Inconvenient Truth are reminiscent, to some extent, of those to Fahrenheit 911.

I didn't see either of those films, but did see Bowling for Columbine. As a non-American whose gast has been flabbered by the ubiquity of guns in the US, I confess to sympathy for the kernel issue therein.

One certainly must appreciate Moore's film-making talent. However, the venal slob completely lost me with his sophistic little "Osama-was-right-the-US-deserved-it" narration as planes crashed into the World Trade Center at the end (of the film about guns).

Then at the Oscars, of course, there was that famous and stereophonic howling preview of his next film.

Wonder what Gore will do up there, on the podium.

Will he plug his new anti-Bush book? Challenge Hillary? Will he provide a sequel to that line he so enjoyed laying on a live audience in one of the trailers I saw for An Inconvenient Truth:

"Hello, I'm Al Gore, and I used to be the next President of the United States."

Personally, that was probably the point at which I proactively decided not to hurry along to see the film. What a vindictive little chimp, I thought. Imagine what might have become of Richard Nixon if he had carried on in a similar fashion to Gore after the 1960 election.

That was the election which Nixon (nominally) lost to JFK by an ultra-slim plurality of 34,227,496 votes to 34,107,646 (translating to a broader 303-219 Electoral College margin).

Nixon had good reason to wail and whinge, but chose not to.

Here's what Paul Johnson says about that result in his A History of the American People:

If Nixon, instead of Kennedy, had carried Texas and Illinois, the shift in electoral votes would have given him the presidency, and the evidence of electoral fraud makes it clear that Kennedy's overall 112,803 vote plurality was a myth: Nixon probably would have won by about 250,000 votes. Evidence of fraud in the two states was so blatant that ... Eisenhower urged Nixon to make a formal legal challenge to the result. But Nixon declined. ... A legal challenge ... would have produced a "constitutional nightmare" and worked heavily against the national interest.

Nixon not only accepted the force of this argument but he actually pleaded successfully with the New York Herald to discontinue a series of articles giving evidence of the frauds ...

This behaviour - ruling out the justified pursuit of self-interest in order to promote the national interest - from probably the only American politician in recent history to be reviled nearly, but not quite, as much as Joseph McCarthy.

The detail supporting a Nixon case for a recount dwarfs that of the chad-based legal suits initiated by Gore.

In some Chicago electorates - these being strongly influenced per se by that city's notorious ganglanders of that era - the number of votes cast exceeded (by thousands) the number of voters registered.

Nixon let it go, with the national interest in mind.

Whereas Nobel nominee Gore, who not only could easily have foreseen the huge damage his court challenges and ongoing and very public denunciations would do to national as well as democratic standing and credibility, but also had the Nixon precedent to follow if he wished, decided instead to pursue a meretricious, self-interested and largely unjustified political-legal witch-hunt.

Should we be surprised if allegations as to both distortions in his documentary as well as hypocrisy in the environmental prudence he preaches vis-a-vis his own practices prove to be correct?

When he instigated legal proceedings to disrobe George Bush of the presidency and award it to himself, Gore's supporters led us to believe that their candidate was a victim of an unprecedented electoral outrage. But democracy, particularly representative democracy, yields strange and often imperfect results. There are at least two examples of 19th century US presidential elections where the defeated candidates were far more hard done by than Gore, and I again paraphrase Paul Johnson:

Case 1:

In the 1876 election Samuel Tilden beat Rutherford Hayes easily, both in the popular vote (4,284,020 to 4,036,572) and in the Electoral College (184 to 165). However, because 20 electoral votes were in dispute, and because the commission deciding the dispute was controlled by Hayes’ party, he was declared elected!

Case 2:

In 1824 Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams in the popular vote (153,544 to 108,740) as well as the College (99 to 84) and carried 11 states to Adams’ 7. Yet Adams was declared the winner (!), because constitutionally (at the time) the Adams-leaning House of Representatives had to pick the winner where a majority of all College votes weren’t won by any single candidate (78 College votes having been won in 1824 by two other candidates).














// posted by spinbad @ 5.2.07