Gore and the Buddhist Monastery

Read the Vanity Fair article “Going After Gore” today to be reminded of the whole fundraising debacle the Veep had involving Buddhists. This Washington Post article from 1999 (by the fair and balanced Ceci Connolly) gleefully pictures Gore “grubbing for dollars inside a monastery.” These days Hillary Clinton has fundraising scandals of her own, but the one with Gore and the Buddhists (the exotic religion carries the whiff of foreign money and therefore corruption that raises American hackles) had particularly long legs. It didn’t lose him the election, but what a different world we’d live in if he’d won. Read the Vanity Fair article to see how not only how “let down” we were by the New York Times and Washington Post in the lead-up to the Iraq war, but how they have been bending the truth in favor of funny and attention-grabbing little soundbites for a long time. And we continue to pay the price. A great quote from the VF article about the press bashing Gore and letting Bush get by:

“Some of it was a self-loathing liberal thing,” [Melinda Henneberger of the NYT] says, “disdaining the candidate who would have fit right into the newsroom, and giving all sorts of extra time on tests to the conservative from Texas. Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Low expectations indeed. Unfortunately the country needed to believe in the President after 9/11 and tried to put its faith in Bush. Wrong horse, wrong time. UPDATE: Japan is trying to alert people to the realities of climate change and get pledges of action. . . by selling Big Macs! – Philip Ryan, Webmaster