An Inconvenient Truth, or "There You Gore Again"

Shockingly, conservatives have been misrepresenting Al Gore again. This time they are claiming that Gore suggested exaggerating the dangers of global warming. Here's the quote which I ran across on a local conservative website.

In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Over time that mix will change. As the country comes to more accept the reality of the crisis, there's going to be much more receptivity to a full-blown discussion of the solutions.

When I first read this on Ivory Dome¹, I honestly couldn't fathom what Gore was being accused of. An over-representation of facts? Well, that's just Al being Al.

It took a little surfing to learn that Bodacious was parroting a wild claim made by professional ostrich Patrick Michaels. Michaels apparently told Sean Hannity that Gore "says it's appropriate to over-represent the danger on this issue."

Um, no. Grammar lesson: the prepositional phrase "of factual presentations" modifies "over-representation." The object of the preposition is "factual". Not danger, not hype, not exaggerated.

Conservatives just hate it when you call them "Orwellian," maybe because they don't like being compared to Big Brother but also possibly because they'd have to read a book to understand the comparision. But when they tell us that "facts" = "lies" what on Earth else are we supposed to call them?

As for Bodacious' claim that the "the speaker wants to 'fix the facts around the policy'," that's just nuts. Gore isn't in charge of any policy outside of the Gore household. He is no longer a public servant. The Supreme Court made sure of that.

spacedark

¹ Which is becoming so infested with our trolls that I suggest renaming the site Panhandle Goon Squad to more accurately portray it as the PTS spinoff that it is.