Remember The Titans! And Al Gore!

Bill Moyers had an excellent interview with the late Joseph Campbell regarding his book "The Power Of Myth". In it Joseph speaks of the commonality of all the world's religions and mythologies, even when they are separated by time and distance. He goes on to state that there are many lessons and much wisdom to be learned from myth. Here in Nashville (The Athens of the South), the home of the only full scale replica of The Parthenon of the Acropolis, mythology is never too far away.

What does this have to do with Al Gore? The lesson of what happened to Al Gore has repeated it self throughout history and myth. A hero or leader comes to the aid of the people and the ones in power trash him for it.

When I think of Al Gore, I think of Prometheus. Prometheus, the son of the Titan Iapetus who took pity on the misery of mankind, huddling in the cold and dark, so Prometheus stole fire from heaven for their benefit. Zeus (Jupiter), enraged at this loss of power caused Prometheus to be chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where a vulture each day devoured his liver, which was made whole again each night, this was supposed to go on for all eternity. Al would not be so lucky.

Al Gore, the son of Tennessee Titan Al Gore Sr. took pity on the American People as they were fed scraps of information on the vital issues of the day. Al, while he was in congress thought that the people should have equal access to the same information as the rich and the powerful. Al Gore recognized ahead of the curve (as he usually does) that for democracy to flourish, the people should have control over the flow of information that will ultimately control their lives. Information is power, so Al decided to become the primary champion of the relatively new technology (now known as the internet) controlled by the defense dept. and some universities and to open it up for everyone.

CNN recently held a poll as to the most revolutionary creation of the 20th century and the internet won hands down. So one might expect praise from such vision, service and dedication to the people, however that would be forgetting the lessons of Prometheus.

The corpwhorate owned MSM were enraged at this loss of power, how dare he! They wanted to remain the sole gatekeepers to the truth so that they could regale us with great stories of runaway brides, missing pretty white women, and various other lurid tales, etc. they could continue do this for all perpetuity. The corpwhorate owned MSM wanted to create a fictitious bubble or Matrix for the American People to live in and Al Gore had endangered their project.

Why would "American Journalism" want to do this to the American People? Because if you are ignorant, you are more easily controlled, and this is all about power. So Al had to be punished for empowering the American People. The corpwhorate owned MSM has no taste for liver with the possible exception of pate de fois gras (goose liver), so they decided to slander, trash, ignore and demean him in every way possible. It still goes on to this day to some degree.

The trashing of Al started in earnest in 1998, although I believe that the witch hunt against Clinton was in truth a back door way for them to hurt Al's chances of coming to power. The War Against Gore began in 1998 with a Wolf Blitzer interview; in it Blitzer asks Al what separates him from Bill Bradley? Blitzer asking Al of and Al is talking about his record in congress. As anyone would do in a job interview, Al speaks of his achievements, primarily in helping to bring about the creation of the internet as we know it today, which in fact is the truth; nothing is said by Blitzer at the time because he knows this is the truth.

One or two days later Dick Armey begins spouting his Republican Talking Points slamming Al for his hubris, and then the corpwhorate MSM begin goose stepping in unison and take up where Dick left off. The MSM says that "Al Gore claims to have invented the internet" which of course is a lie, and it does not end there. "Al Gore claims to have discovered Love Canal" another lie, although he held hearings on toxic waste in Toone, Tennessee which expanded to include Love Canal. The MSM said that Al Gore was wearing earth tones, so he must be a fake, besides being stiff and boring, etc. etc. Al Gore has led a remarkable life and sometimes it reads like fiction such as being an inspiration (along with Tommy Lee Jones) for the book "Love Story" but it is the truth. The corpwhorate owned MSM even did a 180 after the 2000 debates overruling their own focus groups and changing their reporting as to who won those debates overnight, someone had apparently heard him sigh (I did not). As long as Bush did not drool on his on his podium, he was given a standing O. The only time terrorism was ever brought up during those debates was when Al mentioned it. With the corpwhorate MSM, the vital issue of the day (and keep in mind this was after Osama had declared war against us) was who would you rather have in your home for a beer? The nation has been drunk ever since.

The result of all this slander, demeaning and trashing of our best and brightest is the Pottersville that we are currently living in today. But think how much more difficult it would have been for us to get the truth out regarding the Iraq War, the Downing Street Memos, Gannon/Guckert, supporting Cindy Sheehan, Bush's corruption and incompetence etc. without the internet. Think how much more difficult it would be for you to put your opinions out for the masses or praise your favorite leader’s virtues if we did not have the internet. Even the freepers and Bush owe Al; they are just too clueless to know it. It is for these reasons and many more that I will never abandon Al Gore for President.

P.S. For a historical refresher, click on link below and google “War against Gore”.
http://dailyhowler.com/

Nominated.

Click on link for full article.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/5920188?rnd=1126358924375&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1212

<snip>

The coverage was at times blatantly dishonest, and, worse, reporters seemed so determined to stick to pre-assigned scripts ("Gore is a phony") that they balked at correcting obvious errors that began to circulate. (For a complete chronicle of the press's factual missteps in covering Gore, go to dailyhowler.com, a Web site run by Bob Somerby, one of Gore's college roommates and close friends.)
Whether it was the misreported assertion that he'd invented the Internet or the ridiculously exaggerated brouhaha over his quickly corrected claim that he and his wife, Tipper, were models for the young lovers in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story, Gore's close friends and admirers agree that Gore has a penchant for hyperbole. But in last year's election, the press elevated this relatively minor personality quirk into a character-defining issue.
"The coverage seemed to be much more aggressive and adversarial than I'd ever seen before," says Scott Shepard, a veteran newspaper reporter who has four presidential campaigns to his credit and who covered the Gore campaign for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
<snip>

Recalls one network-television correspondent who spent lots of time on the presidential campaign, "There just developed among a certain group of people covering Gore, particularly the print people, a real disdain for him. Everything was negative. They had a grudge against . I don't know how else to put it."
<snip>

The fact that Gore never said he invented the Internet didn't stop the press from telling, and retelling, a story that fit into its prepackaged narrative: Gore is a liar. But it was the journalists, trying hard to paint a damning portrait of Gore, who played it loose with the facts and perpetrated what added up to a complete fabrication.

Here's what happened. In 1999, candidate Gore was taping an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer in which he said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." He was no doubt referring to his landmark "information superhighway" speeches, as well as his well-known support of high-tech research that stretched back into the 1980s. (For the record, Vinton Cerf, often called "the father of the Internet," not to mention futurist Newt Gingrich, have both publicly vouched for Gore's role in helping to shepherd the Internet to life.)

So who coined the phrase "invented the Internet" and attached it to Gore? His Republican opponents, who faxed out a press release suggesting Gore had claimed to have done exactly that.
It's no surprise that GOP operatives would willfully misinterpret a statement from a Democratic presidential candidate. What's amazing is that the press went along with it so uncritically. Was it accurate? The press didn't care, as virtually every major media outlet in the country followed the Republican lead and reported over and over again Gore's claim to have invented the Internet.

Concerned about losing the election on traditional campaign issues such as taxes, Medicare and crime, topics that, according to polls, favored Democrats, the GOP worked to turn the election into a character contest. To do that, Republicans had to link Gore with President Bill Clinton by dismantling the vice president's long-standing image as an earnest Boy Scout and replacing it with that of a phony liar. The New York Times cheered the Republicans' Internet move as "clever" and "ingenious."
<snip>

Often, the GOP didn't even have to prompt the press to create Gore exaggerations - reporters did it all on their own. During a September campaign stop, Gore recalled to a crowd of union workers that his mother used to sing him to sleep at night using "Look for the Union Label" as a lullaby. The press started digging and discovered the story was a fraud and "must be labeled untrue," as USA Today's political columnist Walter Shapiro reported. The TV jingle was written in 1975, when Gore was twenty-seven years old. The story was quickly picked up by cable TV's talkers and print columnists as another "bizarre fabrication."

The only problem was that Gore told the tale as a joke, confirmed by the video of the event, which showed the audience of Teamsters laughing at the mention of the so-called "lullaby." A week later, an editorial in USA Today addressed the issue and actually sided with Gore: "A review of the videotape gives plausibility to that explanation." But Shapiro stands by the column: "I was in the room , and I didn't feel it was a joke, and my tape recorder didn't feel it was a joke. I didn't hear people laughing. But if they were laughing, it was at Gore's awkwardness."
On October 6th, 2000, New York Times reporter Richard Berke referenced the union song prominently in a lengthy piece about Gore's "tendency to embellish," stressing "how Mr. Gore recalled a childhood lullaby that did not exist." Not once did the paper inform readers that both Gore and the members of the audience considered the line to be a throwaway joke.

Like most reporters quizzed about their Gore coverage, Berke agrees that the vice president was the victim of some shoddy press but that he himself did not contribute to it. And more important, says Berke, Gore did exaggerate, so even if some careless journalists made mistakes documenting the alleged embellishments, the story itself was legitimate.

But lots of well-known embellishment stories were not legitimate, such as the infamous Love Canal incident. When Gore spoke at Concord High School in New Hampshire on November 30th, 1999, and urged students to take an active role in politics, he recalled that it was a letter years before from a student in Toone, Tennessee, that got then-Rep. Gore interested in the topic of toxic waste. "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue - and Toone, Tennessee, that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."
The next day, both the Washington Post and the New York Time botched the quote, erroneously reporting Gore had bragged, "I was the one that started it all."

The Post's Ceci Connolly, who covered Gore campaign for eighteen months and made the error, today insists that her miscue "did not change the context" of Gore's original statement. She contends that the key quote, the one that catches Gore embellishing, was the quote "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Yet clearly from his response, Gore used the term "found" in reference to "looking around the country for other sites like" Toone, and in no way suggested he uncovered the Love Canal toxic-waste disaster.

Thanks to the high-profile misquote, though, the media's echo chamber erupted, with MSNBC's Chris Matthews mocking Gore for being delusional, while ABC's George Stephanopoulos lamented that the vice president had "revealed his Pinocchio problem." (In a press release, the ever-helpful Republican National Committee cleaned up the mangled quote, changing "that" to "who" in order to make the misquote grammatically correct: "I was the one who started it all.") This time Gore responded quickly but was again too humble, calling a reporter the morning after the Concord visit to say he was sorry if his Love Canal comments had not been clear enough.
It was actually local students, enrolled in a media-literacy course, who had to set the record straight by taking the unusual step of issuing their own press release under the headline TOP TEN REASONS WHY MANY CONCORD HIGH STUDENTS FEEL BETRAYED BY SOME OF THE MEDIA COVERAGE OF AL GORE'S VISIT TO THE THEIR SCHOOL.

He was really an auto mechanic in Hoboken, NJ. He wasn't even from Tennessee! And he belongs to the "America-Hating Party of America"! Also, he eats live babies! He wants to lower the draft age to 7 and raise retirement age to 102!

Nevermind. I'm just preparing for 2008 if Al runs. I will be working on his campaign long before he declares.

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Great post, Uncle Joe!

I agree with everything you said.

I am with you all the way.
We do have a Gore group, yes?
How in the hell are we going to convince him to run?

All this and more are why my admiration and respect continue to grow. We need you, sir. Please, don't forsake us in this next Presidential election! It's too important, there is too much to be done. We still have a window of opportunity to effect changes that will reverse our present course. We race ever faster toward that closing window...and if we don't do something quickly it will be too late. We need a leader who understands the magnitude and the variety of the problems, who understands how to get the solutions and the answers. That leader is YOU.

THIS IS YOUR TIME - CALL UPON US, WE ARE YOURS - FOR AMERICA