Gorifying the media

Send in the clowns — and the fact-checkers. Al Gore is being
interviewed all over the place.

The new issue of

Rolling
Stone — with Gore standing tall and as erect as a sequoia on the cover — is the most infamous. By now everyone has heard the hilarious report by Inside.com that Gore’s vice-presidential member was so prominent, so manly, in the photo that his pants-front allegedly had to be airbrushed by Rolling Stone’s editors.

Tipper knows, it’s possible. With the Wooden Weirdo, anything could be. The interview itself — which is amazingly inane and ill-befitting a magazine that regularly serves up P.J. O’Rourke and William Greider — is conducted by publisher Jann Wenner, a groveling Goriphiliac who urges everyone to vote for Al in an accompanying editorial.

Held aboard Air Force Two some time in mid-September, it occurred before Gore made such a fool of himself in the first TV debate. Gore spends most of his time connecting with his fellow aging Boomers without being so uncool as to offend the three Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers who will vote next month.

Wenner, God bless him, is one of America’s most stalwart anti-drug war warriors. But he doesn’t think to ask his pal Al what he might do to end that $20 billion-a-year injustice. Nor does he raise the topic of Gore’s alleged pot-smoking binge during the mid-1970s.

But we do learn from Wenner’s lap-dog interrogation that Gore’s favorite band is the Beatles. And that his recent favorite movies include such bloodbaths as “Gladiator” and “Matrix.”

Gore is so full of himself, so desperate to pump up his own volume, so entangled in his crazy metaphors and verbal effusions that even his worst enemies will feel embarrassed for him.

As for the truth of what he says, Gore makes far too many claims for a mere magazine columnist to check. Was he really at that first Beatles concert in D.C.? Was he really so devastated the day “the great man” and “true genius” John Lennon died? We’ll never know — and it’s not worth finding out. Much easier to check will be the crucial role he says he played in leading Congress into the dawn of the Information Age.

When asked if he imagined way back in the late 1970s that one day there would be a consumer use for the Internet, he switches into full self-Gorification mode: “Oh, yes,” he baldly exaggerates. “And I began evangelizing the idea of an information superhighway. There were a lot of others who did the work, who came up with the discoveries. And I never said I invented the Internet. But where the congressional role was concerned, I did take the lead.

“And I went beyond having hearings — I introduced legislation. I pushed big increases in the funding for research into how to expand the capacity of fiber-optic cable, how to develop supercomputers that were more powerful, how to develop the right switches and algorithms to handle the information flow.”

Rolling Stone’s fawning over Gore, not to mention Gore’s fawning over Gore, is enough to make anyone with a weak stomach vote for Bush. A much more skeptical look at Al Gore on the campaign trail can be found in

Brill’s Content, the magazine that makes its living watching over the media.

In “Live But Not in Person,” Seth Mnookin sets out to demonstrate how candidate Gore ticks off the press crews following him around by being so formal, scripted and guarded.

As several long and empty quotations show, Mnookin tried like the devil to get the VP to say something of interest in a one-on-one interview on Air Force Two. He tried repeatedly to get Gore to talk about what advice he, a former newspaper journalist, would give now to his old colleagues about covering politics.

Mnookin couldn’t do it — and Gore’s quotes are too dull to reprint. But they make Mnookin’s point that Gore — for all his big-worded babbling — is a master at saying nothing worth listening to or repeating.

Mnookin tried his best to be fair and kind to Gore, which is something editor William Kristol and his gang of partisan conservatives at

The Weekly Standard aren’t about to do this close to election time.

The Oct. 23 issue, whose cover has a great illustration of an Elvis-like Al Gore combing his hair, asks if Gore’s vain boastings have blown his chances for the White House.

Kristol, noting that events in the Mideast are going to make it impossible for Bush to run out the clock, says it’s still too early to tell if Bush can close the sale.

And if you’re looking for an antidote to Jann Wenner’s mindless slobbering over Gore in Rolling Stone, check out Andrew Ferguson’s funny, devastating attack on Al Gore’s brain and what’s not inside it.

In

“The Metaphors Make the
Man,” Ferguson sets out to destroy the notion that Gore is some kind of intellectual. It’s frighteningly easy. Ferguson does it merely by quoting heavily from yet another impenetrable, wordy interview Gore had recently, this time with the New Economy business magazine

Red
Herring.

Once again, the Gore quotes are not worth the electrons it takes to reprint them. Once again, the more closely you inspect them, the less you find there. Ferguson — whose piece also includes reproductions of four goofy diagrams Gore drew during the interview with Red Herring — arrives at the only conclusion a sane person can: Gore’s drawings, like his pseudo-intellectual ramblings in the interviews, are 99 percent gibberish.