Al Gore's Nobel Prize -- Another Loser Wins

George C. Landrith

At first glance, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore seems absurd.  After all, Gore’s primary occupation is to berate the public about energy use (which makes life pleasant and peaceful), while simultaneously burning enough fossil fuels to power a medium-sized city.  What does that have to do with peace?  Nothing.

But on further reflection, Al Gore as the Nobel Peace Prize winner makes perfect sense. Yasser Arafat, the former, but now defunct leader, of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and a darling of the left, had an impressive record of fomenting terror, violence, and murder. Rigoberta Menchu, the famous indigenous author and darling of the left, wrote an eyewitness account of Guatemala’s civil war, except that it was all a lie. Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, and darling of the left, was seemingly peacefully asleep while several UN officials, not to mention Saddam Hussein, profited scandalously from the food for oil program while innocent Iraqis suffered for lack of those things the program was supposed to have provided. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, oversaw the rise of the Ayatollah’s in Iran, one of the world’s most brutal regimes and a leading terror state.

What does Al Gore have in common with these people?  None of them actually contributed one iota to world peace. However, they are all loved by the left and are adept purveyors of propaganda for leftist causes.  Oh, and one more thing Gore has in common with many recent Nobel Laureates. He’s a bitter and vitriolic critic of President Bush.

The truth is while the Nobel Foundation is lauding Al Gore’s ‘shock-u-mentary,’ An Inconvenient Truth, the British High Court ruled that his movie was ‘one-sided,’ ‘alarmist,’ and ‘exaggerated’ and that it could not be shown in public schools without an accompanying warning as to its politically partisan and inaccurate nature.

As one who has been writing and speaking about climate change for about a decade, I am glad to have a High Court in Great Britain say many of the same things that I have been saying for a long time -- that Al Gore’s views on climate change are exaggerated, alarmist, one-sided, and politically partisan -- not science. That is just another way of saying An Inconvenient Truth is political propaganda. Now a court has ruled it so. And the Nobel Foundation has continued its embarrassing history of awarding people who do nothing to promote peace.

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Mr. Landrith is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Business Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Politics. He had a successful law practice in business and litigation. In 1994 and 1996, Mr. Landrith was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia's Fifth Congressional District. He served on the Albemarle County School Board. Mr. Landrith is an adjunct professor at the George Mason School of Law. He is recognized as an authority on constitutional law and jurisprudence, federalism, global warming, and property rights.

george@ff.org