Cohen Drinks the Global Warming Kool-Aide, Endorses Gore

Richard Cohen gives a breathless account of Al Gore's new global warming scare movie, An Inconvenient Truth:

Boring Al Gore has made a movie. It is on the most boring of all subjects - global warming. It is more than 80 minutes long and the first two or three go by slowly enough so that you can notice that Gore has gained weight and that his speech still seems out of sync.

But a moment later, you will be captivated, then riveted and then scared out of your wits. Our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket.

You will see the Arctic and Antarctic icecaps melting. You will see Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see .photos from space of what the icecaps looked like once and what they look like now, and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to naught. It will be under water.

And of course, watching this movie will make you blame all the Earth's problems on George Bush. Why? Because he beat Al Gore in 2000 and kept his brilliance out of the White House. Cohen goes on to warn us all that must not allow Gore to get away again:

Gore insists his presidential aspirations are behind him. "I think there are other ways to serve," he told me. No doubt. But on paper, he is the near-perfect Democratic candidate for 2008. He won the popular vote in 2000. He opposed going to war in Iraq, but he supported the previous Gulf War - right both times. He is much more a person of the 21st century than most of the other potential candidates. Gore could be a great President. First, he has to be a good candidate.

In the meantime, he is a man on a mission. Wherever he goes, he finds time and an audience to deliver his (free) lecture on global warming. It and the film leave no doubt of the peril we face and neither do they leave any doubt that Gore, at last, is a man at home in his role. He is master teacher, pedagogue, know-it-all, smarter than most of us, better informed and, having tried for and failed to gain the presidency, has raised his sights to save the world. We simply cannot afford for Al Gore to lose again.

I'll be Independence Day gave Cohen nightmares about alien invasions for weeks after he saw that one.