Paul Krugman: "What is it about Al Gore that drives right-wingers insane?"

Gore Derangement Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 15, 2007

....What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening....

***

...if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed....Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/opinion/15krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Rush Limbaugh ridiculed the hybrid cars Al Gore forced Detroit to build protoypes of almost a decade. It's hard for Slimebaugh to say anything now that hybrids have pushed Toyota past GM in cars sales.

things. It must suck to be them, and I hope Al Gore is enjoying his huge moment!

. . . it implies that right wingers aren't already insane.

Yay, Krugman!

sw

n/t

It does knot matter which Democrat gets attention, the wing nuts have to go into their crazed performances. They are so full of fear. They fear anything Fox, Rush, Insanity, and O'Liely tell them to fear. Many of them fear an imaginary old man who sits up in the sky taking notes on all they do. Fear is what drives them. They are over the edge and ought to be put in the asylums Reagan did away with.
What we need to do is learn to laugh at their nuttiness and teach others to enjoy the comedy. There is no reason to take the nuts serious.

character
class
honesty
intelligence
compassion
integrity


things the republicans don't have and have absolutely no idea what they mean.