Magnifisyncopathological

...previously...

So continues The Gore:

American democracy is now in danger - not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11.

Is Gore unfamiliar with the concepts of propaganda, fallacious appeals to emotion and vengeance, and government misinformation? None of this is new and none of this is unique to the post-9/11 world. I think he knows this and unless there is some greater context I'm missing (this is just a large excerpt, after all), he's doing the faux-pandering thing again.

I agree that the marketplace of ideas is suffering. It is suffering from a severe lack of production, in the Randian sense ("with productive achievement as [Man's] noblest activity.")

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess - an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.

Again: either Gore is completely and hilariously ignorant of media sensationalism that existed prior to 1994, or he's deliberately presenting a historical lie to set up some sort of recent exceptionalism in order to bolster his case. I'm barely nine paragraphs into this shit and it pops up everywhere.

The "the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media"? That statement stands alone at the top of the foolishness I've read so far.

For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake.

More misleading bullshit. Current polling shows

• 34% of respondents "favor the war in Iraq"
• 40% (percentage that's held more or less steady since last October) say the US did not make a mistake in sending troops in the first place (and that's "view of the developments since we first sent our troops to Iraq")
• 39% of respondents believe "going to war with Iraq was the right thing for the United States to do"

Gore's been surrounding himself with people who agree with him and the general Democratic take on the war.

Or, he's lying again.

Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

Glaringly obvious to those who wished to dig for them and apply reason to the pile of facts, perhaps. Not to the vast majority of people who are paying attention and who acquire their beliefs consensus-style from talking heads and with which those they already agree. What isn't up for debate is the moral positive in ending the Hussein government in Iraq. That regime deserved to die, but just because it did does not justify any means to accomplish that end. From my perspective, it did not justify using the aggressions of American government embodied in a tax-supported military.

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd's incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money - much of it from special interests - to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore - not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.

And here I thought that until recently, the news media had "normal good sense and judgment."

If you'll allow me a nit-picky moment, the above clearly shows Gore believes active, fully-participant debate in the United States Senate is a good thing. I submit to you that has not been proven and I question it as a premise.