The American Spectator

p> GORE IN THE IMBALANCE br> Re: Doug Powers’s Al Gore’s Hot Flick : /p>

Having written of liberal “acumen that can only be acquired by earning a Master’s Degree in tarantula dentistry,” Doug Powers admonishes, “Global warming? Sorry, Al, but I demand a recount, and from someone with weather, rather than political, experience.”

A similar thought struck me some years before Al penned Earth in the Balance or rather typed up the copious notes his Clintonista muse, EPA Administrator Browning, provided. My illustrious Harvard classmate, then Senator from Tennessee, materialized, as was his wont, in the closing hour of the last day of a climate modeling seminar at Virginia Tech, to tell us what was to be done, albeit he hadn’t bothered to actually attend the argumentative event. So here for the benefit of Mr. Powers and his readers is a link to text inspired in part by Al’s performance in the Early Formative Period of the Climate Wars, an epoch so remote that rising global temperatures had scarcely dried the ink of Ronald Reagan’s signature upon The Montreal Convention. (It appeared originally in the National Interest.)

I hope it may cast some light on Mr. Powers’ novel hypothesis as to the experiential relevance of tarantula dentistry to modeling radiational forcing of climate change. Though no master of that black art (I mean tarantula dentistry), I have witnessed an operation, ably performed.

p>Raising my gaze from a Pipil Maya potsherd embedded in the edge of a test pit at a Honduras archaeological site, I saw a fine pair of Mandibles working sideways in indignation, but before I could utter a word of apology, there came a swishing noise followed by a metallic clank. It came from the surgically sharp machete of Solomon Rodriquez, the preeminent tarantula orthodontist of Roatan, whose combined cleft palate and lobotomy procedure must be ranked as a milestone in painless tarantula dentistry. I unqualifiedly recommend Sr. Rodriquez and both halves of his patient as Assistant Climatologists of Tennessee in the event Al’s untimely return to high office places them in range of his patronage. br> — Russell Seitz br> Cambridge, Massachusetts /p>

I need to bill you for a new monitor because I kept spewing coffee all over it and it fritzed out (just kidding). Thank you for not only the truth, but the humor that presented the truth.