Same Ol' Gore.(Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth')

IN case you haven't heard, there's a "new Al Gore" in town. Time magazine's Ana Marie Cox dubs him a "rock star." Frank Rich, The New Republic, the Washington Post, The American Prospect, and the rest of the liberal media establishment have similarly prostrated themselves before the new Al Gore. The Gore boomlet coincides, unsurprisingly, with the release of his new film, An Inconvenient Truth, which countless liberals have hailed as the Silent Spring of global warming.

Arianna Huffington, whose gifts for prostration are legendary, penned a dispatch from Cannes, where Gore was promoting his movie. Amid her gushing, she reported that Gore told her that this was his second trip to Cannes. "The first," he said, "was when I was fifteen years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists--Sartre, Camus ... We were not allowed to speak anything but French!" "Which," surmised Huffington, "may explain his pitch-perfect French accent."

In a column for the L.A. Times, I expressed my skepticism about all of the above. There is no new Al Gore; the only thing that is new, I explained, is the Democrats' sudden pre-buyer's remorse over Hillary Clinton--whose implausible sprint to the center strikes too many liberals as plausible. Gore, meanwhile, has everything liberals want in a president. He may not be an official victimized minority--say, a black hermaphrodite--but he was "robbed" of the presidency by George W. Bush, so he counts as a victim. Moreover, he's screamed a lot about how evil President Bush is, endorsed Howard Dean, and revived his global-warming Jeremiah act (which he kept under wraps in 2000). This has caused liberals to herd themselves into one of the greatest examples of wishful-groupthink in recent memory.

In that column, I called attention to the fact that Gore's recollection of whiling away his summer in France ribbiting about Camus runs counter to the facts as presented in several reputable biographies of Gore (which also report that Gore received mediocre grades in French ...