Exhibit #106: Why do so many people despise Al Gore?

American Thinker Blog: Lomborg vs. [Fraudster Al] Gore

Bjorn Lomborg somehow finagled an audience with the Pope of Global Warming, Al Gore. Lomborg asked him if he'd be willing to have a debate, not on the scientific merit of Anthropogenic Global Warming, but on whether government money is best spent on fighting it.

Pope Gore took over two and a half minutes to essentially answer "no," he would not be willing to have such a debate. After opening with "I want to be polite to you," Pope Gore compared Lomborg to the tobacco industry that fought the cigarette-cancer link. He also said the entire north polar ice cap will disappear in five years and that each meter of sea-level rise displaces 100,000,000 people. "It is not a matter of theory or conjecture."

1997: Al Gore's Passion: - Reason Magazine

Yet this was the same Al Gore whose family grew the raw material for Marlboros and Camels; who bragged about his tobacco roots when he tried to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 ("I've hoed it, I've dug it, I've sprayed it," etc.); and who accepted campaign contributions from cigarette companies through 1990. This was the same former Tennessee senator who, at the 1996 Democratic National Convention, shamelessly exploited the story of his sister's death in an attempt to explain his embrace of the anti-smoking crusade. After his sister, who started smoking as a teenager, died of lung cancer in 1984, this tobacco hoer, digger, and sprayer had an epiphany: Smoking can kill you. "And that is why," he somberly proclaimed, "until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking."
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Even if we manage to believe that his sister's lung cancer opened Gore's eyes to the evils of tobacco, that doesn't explain why, for years after her death, he continued to profit, through campaign contributions and income from land his family leased for tobacco cultivation, from the habit he now assails as "the number one leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States." Asked about this apparent inconsistency after his convention speech, Gore cited a six-year period of "numbness" that prevented him from severing his ties to the Merchants of Death. "Sometimes you never fully face up to things that you ought to face up to," he said, lapsing into what sounded like a quote from The Wonder Years. "You never fully learn the lessons that life has to teach you."