Year 2, Month 7, Day 8: Like Asphyxiating Fish In A Barrel

More on Gore, from the June 22 Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Al Gore has gone public with his complaints about President Barack Obama’s environmental record and leadership on climate change – legitimizing a groundswell of grumbling from the left and throwing open the door for more of the same.

(snip)

It’s bad news for the White House – especially coming on the heels of a new poll showing that only 30 percent of Americans say they definitely plan to vote for Obama in 2012.

“President Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis,” the former vice president wrote in a 7,000-word essay for Rolling Stone. “He has simply not made the case for action. He has not defended the science against the ongoing, withering and dishonest attacks. Nor has he provided a presidential venue for the scientific community – including our own National Academy – to bring the reality of the science before the public.”

Sent June 22:

While Al Gore’s critique of President Obama makes excellent headlines, the real problem lies elsewhere — in the irresponsibility of politicians and corporate forces which place the well-being of the world’s corporations above that of the world’s people. The readiness of our elected representatives to ignore actual scientific expertise in favor of bizarre conspiracy theories is a symptom of the extent to which the fossil-fuel sector exerts control over our government; the readiness of our media to play a specious game of false equivalency in which every worried climatologist is “balanced” by a paid shill for Big Oil is likewise a symptom of that industry’s influence on our print and broadcast outlets. With rapidly deteriorating oceans, melting icecaps, worldwide outbreaks of extreme weather and catastrophe looming on the horizon, it’s time for politicians, media and corporations to get to work on something more important than protecting profit margins. Protecting us.

Warren Senders