those annoying evangelicals

why can't they keep their dogma to themselves?!?

Al 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...

And Gore’s environmentalism, as laid out in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, was and still is nothing more than a tissue of worn-out Romantic clichés, 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...

Then came 2000, the “stolen” election, and the Bush administration’s subsequent rejection of the ludicrous Kyoto treaty. Now Gore’s wounded ego, his hatred of George Bush, and his romantic environmentalism all found the perfect public issue in global warming... 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 Earth in the Balance: there he wrote that his purpose is “to fully search my heart and mind about this challenge to which I feel called — and in the process to summon the courage to make a full and unreserved commitment to see it through.” The rhetoric of evangelical Christianity is obvious. One wonders, though, how much “courage” 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’s 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 “documentary” award given to Michael Moore’s fictive pastiche Bowling for Columbine.

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’t met a dictator whose boots he won’t 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 — he of the impotent International Atomic Energy Agency, another Bush-scolder whose “diplomacy” has accomplished nothing other than giving the Iranian mullahs more time to get the bomb — got one too in 2005. Then there’s the literature Nobel awarded that same year to rabid lunatic Harold Pinter, whose anti-Americanism makes Iran’s Ahmadenijad sound like a Republican Rotarian on the fourth of July. And let’s 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.