Al Gore's latest is hard to believe"
From The Daily Trojan (Student Newspaper of the University of Southern California)
Daniel McFawn
Issue date: 10/5/06
In the world of politics, politicians say some blatantly stupid phrases. So many nonsensical sayings have been uttered that day calendars can be made every year with new quotes for all 365 days, or 366 for those leap years.
Recently, while at the United Nations on invitation from his pal Kofi Annan, former senator, vice president and self-appointed global warming warrior Al Gore added yet another phrase to that lengthy list. "Cigarette smoking is a significant contributor to global warming," said the greenhouse gas fighter.
Despite the alleged role of millions of automobiles, thousands of jet liners, industrial ocean tankers, emerging industrial economies and third-world pollution, cigarette smoking, said Gore, is enough to have the landmass of Greenland run "a real risk of splitting in two, and, if that happens, substantial parts of Manhattan, Shanghai and Bombay will disappear."
Keep in mind that this is the same Al Gore who accused the Bush White House of using "fear tactics" with the war on terror.
Following his numbing three-hour speech at the United Nations on the bane of mankind and all life on Earth, Gore answered questions about his future political ambitions and then opened boxes of his book, "An Inconvenient Truth," to sell to the U.N. audience.
What heightens the degree of the statement's absurdity, aside from its sheer ridiculousness, is the fact that Gore worked on his family's tobacco farm growing up. While running in the Democratic presidential primary in 1988, Gore said, "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've dug in it. I've sprayed it, I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it."
Furthermore, one month after Gore's sister died from lung cancer in 1984, he received a speaker's fee from an American tobacco company. The next year, he voted against three bills to increase taxes on cigarettes and tobacco and favored a bill to allow major cigarette producers to purchase discounted tobacco. He did all of this while accepting campaign contributions from major tobacco producers.
The hypocrisy does not end there. While showing his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," at the Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera, Gore rode in his caravan of black General Motors sport utility vehicles only a couple blocks from his hotel to the festival. This is the same person who called for the end of internal combustion engines worldwide in his 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit."
In the state of California it is illegal to smoke in a public building or commercial venue. The smokers that the state has relocated outside are now contributing "significantly" to global warming. According to Gore's logic, it seems that California is now promoting global warming and the death and destruction that go along with it, rather than curbing it. This seems quite odd. Where do environmentally conscious smokers now go? This is very bad news for hippies.
Regardless of what kind of opinion one holds on the issue of global warming, it is quite hard to take Al Gore seriously given his hypocrisy, obscure statements and downright absurdity. This is now especially true with the addition of the global-warming-cigarette-smoking statement. He has ridden his passionate pony of global warming thinking that he is King Arthur when he is closer to Don Quixote. This new quote will undoubtedly end up on a day calendar of stupid phrases. But let's just hope that day is within the next nine years and 110 days, which is when the apocalyptical fiery wrath of global warming will commence, according, of course, to Gore himself.
Posted by Blad
