Critique of pure unreason.(The Week)(The Assault on Reason by Al Gore)

I WAS initially looking forward to reading Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. But after reading an excerpt from it in Time magazine and catching a few of his interviews, I decided there wasn't much of a point. I thought The Assault on Reason was going to be something of a philosophical treatise explaining Gore's own complicated views on reason (more on those in a moment). Instead, it turns out that Gore's book is little more than an as-told-to-tale of the leftwing nutroots. Fox News is evil. Bush is a liar. Everything every Democrat ever said supporting the Iraq War is irrelevant. Because Bush is a liar. And, most important, anyone who disagrees or remembers things differently is part of the assault on reason.

This is by no means a new shtick for liberals. Indeed, for more than half a century the general liberal tactic has been to hold up a Medusa's-head version of "hateful" conservatism and then offer the light of liberalism as the only means of banishing the demon. But what's interesting is this specific focus on reason as the exclusive property of liberals. Left-wing bloggers still crow about how they are the "reality-based community," for example. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait claims that liberals are "empiricists" and "fact finders" while conservatives wear dogmatic blinders. And a few years ago, Robert Reich wrote his 327th (a rough estimate) stupid book. It was called Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America. It was your typical concatenation of ad hominem and straw-man attacks, followed by seemingly reasonable and humane liberal dogma.

And that's why I was looking forward to Gore's book. Because, to my mind, Gore had established himself as America's leading liberal critic of reason. In Earth in ...