It takes a lot to make my dander rise. A man of eupeptic
disposition, I find in life occasion for vastly more amusement than
irritation. Not for me the dungeon of dudgeon. My rose-colored
lenses are fixed on the bright side. The cup is half-full and,
amazingly runneth over too.
But the Talmud says even God expresses rage for a split-second
each day. I am entitled to this one moment, then: my blood is
currently at what the spaghetti box calls a “rapid boil.” So, as
the prophet says, “I will speak and it will becalm me.” The
gentleman whose preposterous utterances have catalyzed my apoplexy
is none other than Albert Arnold Gore Jr., late of Blair House. The
man is an invidious, overweening, condescending, pompous,
officious, imperious, supercilious… but perhaps I should start at
the beginning.
There is a fine first-term Congressman in the state of
Washington (8th District) named Dave Reichert, who is struggling
somewhat in his bid for reelection. To an extent this is an almost
inevitable result of the circumstances of his election in 2004. He
breezed through that race because voters knew his name from the
news long before he was a candidate. He was a local hero, the cop
who caught the Green River Killer in 2003.
The killer, Gary Ridgway, was responsible for at least 48
murders of women over a period of more than twenty years. He had
escaped detection for a number of reasons. One, he held down the
same job for all those years and never missed time from work. Two,
his job was at a car-painting garage, so he could repaint his truck
frequently to thwart the extant descriptions. Three, for the last
decade he was happily married to a very nice lady (similar in this
to Dennis Rader, the BTK killer in Kansas).
There was a task force assigned to the cases, beginning in 1982
and continuing through all the years, with budgets and staffs
varying in size based on the prevailing political mood. Reichert
had been in this group all along, starting as a very young
detective, and towards the end he was placed in charge. He
instituted a review of all suspects that had been questioned in
each killing and identified the two strongest. Then he prevailed
upon a judge to issue a warrant to demand they provide a DNA sample
to be tested against sperm that had been harvested from victims’
bodies many years earlier. Ridgway’s matched; he was arrested and
eventually confessed to 48 murders, helping investigators find
missing bodies in return for a life sentence instead of the death
penalty.
Reichert got the job in Congress as a reward from a grateful
community. The downside of these elections by acclamation is that
after two years people often figure that the ledger is now even,
the debt has been paid. It becomes a scenario of “the second time
is the first time,” where the incumbent is asking to be taken
seriously as a Congressman, rather than seen as an amateur who was
given a sinecure. This forces Reichert to distinguish himself from
fellow Republicans by occasionally bucking the party line,
particularly on conservation issues that are dear to Washingtonians
who prize their state’s arboreous landscape. (Ironically, this very
quality endears it to serial killers, because they can leave
corpses in forested areas. From Ted Bundy to Ridgway, the list is
long.)
Along comes Al Gore, brought in as a hatchet man to undermine
Reichert’s credibility as a conservationist. In an onstage
appearance at a Seattle University fundraiser for a few Democrat
candidates, this pseudo-spontaneous exchange ensued. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels told
Gore that Reichert doubts that global warming is caused by humans.
Gore responded: “C’mon! And this man is a United States
Congressman? You know, 15 percent of people believe the moon
landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number
still believe the Earth is flat. They get together on Saturday
night and party with the global-warming deniers.”
How utterly creepy! Here is a man who solved an old case with
new science, who is hardly a crank of any stripe, being scoffed at
by a world-class fraud. What has Gore ever done to help a single
real person? What are his scientific qualifications? He has no
science background or degree of any kind. He is the one signing on
to a massive conspiratorial fantasy worthy of Chicken Little.
Suddenly the Earth is burning up? And we have the power to reverse
it? Each of those premises is a patent absurdity worthy of The
Emperor’s New Clothes. Fairy tales.
Unfortunately the politico-cultural winds blow in such a way
that Reichert is embarrassed into backtracking and double-talking.
In twenty or thirty years from now, Gore and his ilk will be
exposed as charlatans and mountebanks of the first order who
corrupted science for the sake of political alchemy, turning
paranoia into the gold of Federal tax dollars. Gore’s movie is
called An Inconvenient Truth; in reality it is A
Convenient Lie. It is time for Republicans to find the courage
to scoff at the likes of Al Gore, who persist in warming the globe
with their hot air.
