Gore film

And I don't mean "Halloween X: When In Doubt, Blame The Druids," either. Roger Ebert has an article here on Al Gore and his new "Inconvenient Truth" movie. Now, as you know, I don't think Gore is the savior that some in the Democratic blogsphere have convinced themselves he is.

I think a lot of them, on some level, believe that if we can just get Gore in the oval office where he should have been all along, we can magically make it like the past years have never happened.

And it ain't that easy. The list of names responsible for what's happened to this country is long and yes, Republicans make up most of it, with Bush at the top of the tree. But Democrats haven't exactly been covering themselves in glory either and Al Gore is among them.

That said, Ebert makes the film sound better than it looked to me in the trailer.

What he wants you to know is that he has not made a political film. Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" tries to move outside politics and focus on the facts of global warming. Gore says those facts are established, the returns are in, there is almost unanimous scientific agreement about them, and we may have about 10 years before the earth reaches a tipping point from which it cannot recover.

Now that's the kind of talk I like to hear. I like the idea of simply presenting the facts, for which there is overwhelming evidence, and saying This Is The Case. I only wish Democrats would do it about more things.

I've been thinking lately that another of the reasons this blog is not as political as it used to be is for similar reasons: As far as I'm concerned, the facts are in, and in any even reasonably rational universe, virtually the entire Bush administration would be thrown out of the White House.

But I don't have the power to make that happen, and the people who do are extraordinarily unlikely to be listening to me, let alone reading this blog. So I can do lots of posts about what a closed-minded twit George W. Bush is, or I can run pictures of Anne Hathaway.

What would you do?

Ebert further goes on to say of Gore,

He has been traveling the world for six years making speeches in which this message has evolved. But all of those speeches put together have not had the impact of this new documentary, directed by Davis Guggenheim, which is horrifying, enthralling and has the potential, I believe, to actually change public policy and begin a process which could save the earth.

But then, Gore turns around and reminds me of another reason I don't quite trust him.

"...the energy industry has paralyzed America for 20 years with disinformation...They're using exactly the same strategy the tobacco industry used. They're saying there is a 'controversy,' and they refer to a 'debate' when in fact the scientific consensus on global warming is definitive."

Unfortunately, whenever Gore mentions tobacco, I remember things like this:

Six years after Vice President Al Gore's older sister died of lung cancer in 1984, he was still accepting campaign contributions from tobacco interests.

Four years after she died, while campaigning for president in North Carolina, he boasted of his experiences in the tobacco fields and curing barns of his native Tennessee. And it took several years after Nancy Gore Hunger's death for Gore and his parents to stop growing tobacco on their own farms in Carthage, Tenn.

So from where exactly does he get the moral authority to point a finger and say "shame, shame, shame?"

Again-
That said-

I believe he's right about this, and I hope the movie fulfills the potential Ebert believes it has; that would obviously be its greatest success.

But some people think the film is some sort of a shadowy stalking horse for a Gore '08 campaign...and I gotta say, I still hope not.