Free to be Al Gore

E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post:

Al_goreBoy, it would be fun if Al Gore changed his mind and ran for president — fun for the voters, anyway. Imagine a candidate whose preelection book is devoted in large part to an attack on the media for waging war on reason.

Politicians, it is often said, never win by attacking the media. That’s simply not true. Conservatives have been attacking the media for decades, to good effect from their point of view. Their intimidation sometimes worked — go back to the coverage of the 2000 Florida recount if you want to see media bias. When intimidation fails, they declare inconvenient facts to be merely “liberal” opinions.

It’s delightful to see the critique coming from the other side. Gore’s book, “The Assault on Reason,” to be released today, is about “the strangeness of our public discourse” as mediated through television….

…Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

More here.