The Swift-Boating of "An Inconvenient Truth"

Our friends, the God-fearing, integrity-filled, conservatives are continuing to tell lies about Al Gore, and his new movie.

First, we had Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis delicately comparing the former vice-president to Joseph Goebbels (yes, of cource the slur was broadcast on Fox. Surprised?) Additional fun fact to know and tell: Sterling Burnett's organization has received close to $400,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. Gore's movie may be called An Inconvenient Truth, but the discovery that critics of the movie are being bankrolled by the oil companies is what we call an inconvenient coincidence.

Next, Steve Forbes (again with an assist from good old Fox) lets us know that Gore's movie might destroy the economy. Never mind the planet, I guess: If Forbes and his kind can't make boatloads of money, it's all pointless. Side point: What does Forbes think global warming will do to the economy?

TNR has the rest of the story:

"The [campaign against the movie] is one for the textbooks, a laboratory-perfect case study of modern conservative media. First, there is the bizarre and aggressively anti-intellectual Drudge Report item, in this case an "**Exclusive**" about Southern California teenagers being frog-marched by their science teacher to view the perfidious Gore film. We imagine the poor Beverly Hills High students were strapped into their seats wearing eyelid clamps, as in the brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange...

Next, there is the ad campaign. The two 60-second spots created by the oil industry-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)--over $1.5 million in donations from ExxonMobil alone since 1998--will be remembered for breaking the barrier between advertising parodies and actual ads. In "Energy," a young girl dreamily exhales carbon dioxide while evergreen trees soak in the life-sustaining compound.

Our right to freely exchange this compound, CEI suggests, is now under attack. The ad makes the War on Christmas look like a mild skirmish compared with the impending confrontation over CO2. "Carbon dioxide," an announcer intones. "They call it pollution. We call it life."

CEI's second ad takes a stab at refuting the science behind global warming--specifically, studies documenting melting polar ice sheets. "The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner," the ad cheerily declares, while an image of a study from Science flashes across the screen. Just one problem with the claim: It's completely misleading. The study's author, Curt Davis of the University of Missouri, was so horrified that he released a statement. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," he said. "They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims." Global warming is melting sea ice and the coastal areas of Antarctica at an alarming rate, which in turn has increased precipitation, thus thickening the ice in the interior. In other words, the melting coasts are making it snow more in the middle. But this is a bug, not a feature. Overall, the ice sheet is losing mass, not gaining it. As Davis said in response to the CEI ads, "The fact that the interior ice sheet is growing is a predicted consequence of global climate warming."

It's begining to occur to me, that Democrats have recently been murdered at the polls, not because they have no ideas, but because they won't play dirty. How can you - and here I address myself to observant Jews - make common cause with the purveyors of such deliberate dishonesty? If, godforbid, I was a republican, I swear slimy tactics like the ones described here would make me quit the party. And I have very little respect for Republicans who are aware of the cheap games their people play, but blissfully look the other way.