As predicted: anti-Gore coalition gears up

Well, it didn't take long. I despise Matt Drudge, but I drop by his Website daily to see how the right-wing shill is spinning the news according to RNC standards. This morning, as I was making my morning rounds on the Internet, this was the headline on Drudge's site. Of course, it's an oversimplification of what Gore really means. The headline on Drudge linked to a Time excerpt of Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, which comes out next Tuesday.

Here's a portion of the excerpt:

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

[Snip]

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to "psychographic" categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush's economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president's controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.

(Note that the highlighted, bold entries in the above passages are mine, and not in the original.) The rest of the Time excerpt is Here.

Now, you be the judge - is Al Gore really saying, as Drudge implies with his headline on his Website, that "American Democracy is now in danger"? What he is saying, as explained in the excerpt above, is that our idea or brand of democracy is in danger. AND IT IS.

The MoveOn example above I find particularly disturbing and outrageous. It's one of an infinite number of examples that one can find where the White House manipulates the mass media in this country. In part, we have Ronald Reagan to thank for that. His suspension of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 has allowed corporate-owned networks to air their political views, to the detriment of the marketplace of ideas, which traditionally allowed people to hear opposing views and weigh political decisions.

Now, media conglomerates are free to express political views (and advertisements) that align with their corporate interests. I'm going to be blogging much more about the Fairness Doctrine in the near future - I don't have enough time to adequately cover it now.

Gore's example of how a significant portion of the population still believes that Iraq is connected to 9-11 is pretty telling as well. (Somewhere, Karl Rove is clapping his hands with glee.) This administration willfully lies, then denies that it's done so. Iraq is the best example of it. Lie, lie, lie, until you start to believe it is the mantra of Bush's cabal. They'll even answer the question about Iraq having anything to with 9-11 with a "no," but in the same sentence they'll bring up 9-11 anyway. And many people are falling for it.

The War in Iraq is in many ways a PR and marketing effort. It's about manipulating public opinion to maintain support of the war. Since that support is evaporating, Bush is merely turning the war into a Democrat vs. Republican ideological war. Republicans are treating withdraw from Iraq as a defeat for the party. Maybe it would be, and maybe it wouldn't, but the overwhelming concern should be the lives of American troops and American interests. But those things don't matter to this administration.

I think that's part of what Al Gore means. I'm really looking forward to his book, but I'm anticipating the right's reaction to his book even more. I'm sure Sean Hannity already has a special planned. I sure hope so.

There's lots of Gore on Time's Website. Another piece, The Last Temptation of Al Gore, talks about Gore's potential presidential candidacy next year, which unfortunately is looking less and less likely. A brief excerpt of the excerpt:

"It happens all the time," says Tipper Gore. "Everybody wants to take him for a walk in the woods. He won't go. He's not doing it!" But even Tipper—so happy and relieved to see her husband freed up after 30 years in politics—knows better than to say never: "If the feeling came over him and he had to do it, of course I'd be with him." Perhaps that feeling never comes over him. Maybe Obama or Clinton or John Edwards achieves bulletproof inevitability and Gore never sees his opening. But if it does come, if at some point in the next five months or so the leader stumbles and the party has one of its periodic crises of faith, then he will have to decide once and for all whether to take a final shot at reaching his life's dream. It's the Last Temptation of Gore, and it's one reason he has been so careful not to rule out a presidential bid. Is it far-fetched to think that his grass-roots climate campaign could yet turn into a presidential one? As the recovering politician himself says, "You always have to worry about a relapse."

I have a great amount of respect and admiration for Gore's work and activism, but I still say that he could make the greatest amount of difference by running for president (and winning). Polls still show him with significant public support, as an undeclared candidate.

Run, Al. Please.