With Juan Miguel Gonzalez now in Washington, the awful spectacle around his shipwrecked son Elian is moving, at last, toward closure. His Miami relatives feel the legal sand beneath their feet shifting further by the hour. The fantasy of a family court hearing is fading, as is the fantasy of uncle Lazaro Gonzalez’s custody of the boy, while the Justice Department draws up its plan to return Elian to his father.
This brief moment between Juan Miguel’s arrival and the revocation of custody grants some time — time to consider some of the myths that still permeate media coverage of Elian’s saga.
Myth No. 1. This is a fight over “the best interests of the child.” I put that question to pioneering child psychiatrist Dr. Albert Solnit. He is founder of the Yale University Child Study Center and architect, along with Anna Freud and Joseph Goldstein, of child-protection standards that shaped laws in many states over the last two generations.
However you look at it, says Solnit, no legal or psychological “best interest” standards are involved here. The best interests of the child, says Solnit, “refers to continuity of affectionate, protective care.” That means care over a lifetime, not a few months. There are times, Solnit agrees, when a child’s bonds with a foster family outweigh those of his biological parents; but for a 6-year-old, Solnit says, four months in a foster-family’s care “is no contest. Especially since by all reports this boy’s father was as much if not more involved with his care than his mother.”
The role cast for Elian by Miami’s Cuban leadership reminds Solnit of the exploitation of children in particularly contentious divorces. “We see this all the time in divorcing parents who use the child as a way to keep fighting. The parents stay tied to one anther through agression — and the child is just a medium to do this, gets treated like chattel.
But what about the argument advanced by Miami’s Cubans, that returning to Cuba is by definition against Elian’s best interests? “Look,” says Solnit. “I wouldn’t like to live in Cuba. But for a young child, the parent is the country.”
Myth No. 2. Elian’s case belongs in family court. That’s the position articulated by Lazaro Gonzalez’s family, by Florida’s politicos — and recently by Vice President Al Gore, who in his desperate desire to defeat George W. Bush in Florida infuriated his own party by endorsing the Elian residency bill.
In fact, nothing could be further damaging to Elian than months of dragged-out, overwrought custody hearings. Historian Linda Gordon points out that claims like those made by Elian’s Miami relatives — offering a culturally superior upbringing “in the best interests of the child” — are common through history. The same argument was used by white Australians who snatched children from their aboriginal parents, on behalf of Inuit children forcibly removed from their families in Canada, as well as Sephardic Jewish children stolen and given to Ashkenazic Jewish families in Israel. As Gordon puts it, all such cultural custody fights are “saturated with politics” and profoundly traumatic for the children involved.
Indeed, federal Judge K. Michael Moore warned weeks ago that Lazaro Gonzalez’s lawyers might “bring about unintended harm” with their unsuccessful lawsuit seeking political asylum for the boy. Moore said that harm might grow with “each passing day” Elian is separated from his father.
Myth No. 3: If the case went to family court, Elian’s Miami relatives would win. On this one, Attorney General Janet Reno should propose a deal: Let the case go to family court, provided only that Lazaro Gonzalez agrees to a change of venue from Florida to some state where the family judges aren’t elected by Cuban contributions and consultants. Reno could make that bet with a clean conscience, because the Lazaro Gonzalez household would give any reasonable judge not on the Miami Cuban payroll pause. Lazaro himself has two DUI convictions. Elian’s cousins have robbery convictions. Daughter Marisleysis, touted as Elian’s “surrogate mother,” is only 22.
And the Miami Cuban leaders who have insinuated themselves into the Gonzalez household and financed Lazaro’s legal team make the picture even worse, from a child-custody standpoint. Jorge Mas Santos, head of the Cuban American National Foundation and a key player in the case, was recently identified as the focus of a grand jury investigation involving $58 million in Miami-Dade County paving contracts for work never performed, according to the Miami Herald. These are the kinds of mobbed-up associations any family judge would have to question.
Myth No. 4: The vitriol of Miami’s Cuban-American leaders stems from their passionate feelings about Elian. In fact, there are so many political agendas at work that even veteran Miami politics-watchers need a scorecard to keep track. Gonzalez family lawyer Jose Garcia Pedrosa ran a bitter election campaign against then-state’s attorney Janet Reno in the mid-’80s. He outspent Reno by a considerable margin and still lost. Could there be just a hint of vendetta in this new fight? Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, who wrote to Reno urging the case be turned over the family court and was a key voice urging Gore to adopt the same view, is married to a Cuban-American business executive who herself arrived in Miami separated from her parents in Operation Pedro Pan. And on and on.
Myth No. 5: Miami’s Cuban leaders represent the democratic alternative to Fidel Castro. If anything is apparent by now, it’s that Miami’s mainstream Cuban leadership has little use for the machinery of democracy if it gets in the way of its war with Castro. If federal courts rule that Elian must go home, Miami’s local government has emphatically said it will refuse to cooperate. When the Miami Herald a few years ago ran articles charging Cuban-American leaders with corruption, the paper received bomb threats.
Historically, the only free speech Miami’s Cuban leaders care about is the speech they can buy. Between 1979 and 1997, the Cuban American National Foundation and its leaders funneled more than $3 million into congressional and presidential campaigns, creating, as the Center for Public Integrity has said, “an influence machine that, dollar for dollar, is arguably the most effective lobbying force in Washington.”
Let’s face facts: Guided from the start by such profound distortions and myths, Elian’s saga has degenerated to the point where there can be no good outcome.
There’s no good outcome for Miami’s Cuban-Americans, either. Those community leaders who appointed themselves handlers for Lazaro Gonzalez may have hoped to increase their influence and attain a symbolic victory over Castro. Instead, they have convinced the rest of the United States that they are narrow-minded fanatics, and have so diminished their political influence that even the Republicans have turned against them. The bill to give Elian Gonzalez permanent residency cannot get out of committee in a GOP Congress, surely the greatest failure of all time for the massively well-heeled Cuba lobby. The Elian story has done more to erode public support for the Helms-Burton Cuba embargo than all the visits to Havana by liberal churches and lawyers in the past 20 years.
There is certainly no good outcome for Gore, who, just a week after positioning himself as a born-again reformer, managed to convince most of the American public that he is an inveterate panderer. He may well have even hurt his chances of winning Florida’s 25 electoral votes, since many Floridians resent the special treatment granted Little Havana.
Most of all, there is no good outcome for Elian. He has already lost his mother and spent four months in legal and emotional limbo, paraded before television cameras. His departure from his Miami relatives will certainly not be easy, and he will carry new scars to his reunion with his father. His delusional Miami foster family seems at this writing to be nurturing one final fantasy, that Juan Gonzalez will make a sudden decision to remain in the United States. Don’t hold your breath.
The time for fantasies — for prophetic visions of the Virgin and dolphins — is over, and the sooner Elian is on a plane to Havana, the better. When he is gone, there will be only one question worth asking: Who are the politicians — from Little Havana to Washington — who were so willing to sacrifice a child?
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is almost upon us and the commemorations are well underway. So it’s probably not surprising that someone would commission a poll asking Americans how different they think world would now be if their country’s response had been guided not by George W. Bush but by Al Gore.
What is surprising is what the poll, conducted by “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair, found: A clear majority of Americans — 56 percent — don’t really think anything would be different. This includes 62 percent of independents, 57 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of Democrats. Even among Democrats, only 44 percent say they thought the world would be a better place now if Gore had been in the White House back then.
If the numbers seem startling, it’s because the “global war on terror” that Bush chose to launch in the wake of 9/11 has long seemed like an especially vivid affirmation of the truism that elections have consequences. You could argue that virtually any president would have signed off on the invasion of Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, but Iraq was a war of choice, and as Bush was making his case for it in the fall of 2002, Gore’s was perhaps the loudest voice in American politics saying, “No!” The question of whether the world would be much different today has President Gore been in power seems like an open and shut matter. How could it not be?
And yet, there actually is a strong case for the public’s skepticism.
It starts with remembering just how conditioned Americans in 2001 were to view Saddam Hussein as the source of much of the world’s evil and instability — and just how easy and painless they had come to believe war was.
This was a product of the first Gulf War, which had been sold as a noble and necessary effort to check the aggression of a brutal tyrant with dreams of regional hegemony. “We’re dealing with Hitler revisited!” George H.W. Bush famously declared in the fall of 1990. Americans bought in and rejoiced when Operation Desert Storm ended with Hussein’s army evicted from Kuwait, and with surprisingly minimal Americans casualties.
But the ease with which victory was attained also led to hubris, and politicians from both parties, media commentators, and average voters spent the rest of the decade lamenting Bush’s failure to “finish the job” — that is, to pivot when he had the chance from Kuwait to a full-scale invasion of Iraq that would have ended Hussein’s reign. Hussein’s own actions only encouraged this thinking. After the war, he quickly resumed his menacing posture, crushing a Kurdish uprising and taunting U.N. weapons inspectors for years to come. Americans were also told that he’d tried to arrange the assassination of Bush in 1993.
This explains why, during one inspection showdown in 1998, a Gallup poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans wanted President Clinton to use airstrikes to target Hussein himself (instead of just his supposed weapons installations), and 60 percent wanted American ground forces to launch an invasion. Clinton, like Bush before him, recognized that this was “unfeasible,” but he felt compelled to balance his desire to avoid war and occupation with voters’ intense hatred and fear of the Iraqi madman. Thus, he attacked Hussein as aggressively in his speeches as Bush had, approved some airstrikes, and signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which put the U.S. government on record supporting regime change.
So while there were no Iraqi nationals on any of the 9/11 flights, it was easy for foreign policy hawks — and, in particular, the neoconservatives who had long seen the forced removal Hussein as the first step in the democratization of the Middle East — to convince the public that at least part of their thirst for vengeance should be directed at Hussein. It was only natural for Americans to assume that a man they saw as “Hitler revisited” must have some way, somehow been involved in the attacks on their homeland. And even if he hadn’t, well, surely he’d be behind the next one — unless we acted now to stop him.
The story of how Bush bought into this is well-known. His instinct after 9/11 was too think big and aggressively, and his inner circle was littered with neocons and other hawks who’d been waiting for just the right opening to push for an invasion of Iraq. This, supposedly, would not have been the case in a Gore White House.
But look a little closer and you’ll realize that President Gore would have been hearing the same pleas. His own vice president would have been Joe Lieberman, perhaps the most hawkish Democrat in Washington on Middle East issues. Marty Peretz, his old friend and confidante, would have had Gore’s ear and filled it with arguments for going into Iraq. Loud, influential, non-conservative media voices — like Tom Friedman and Peter Beinart — would have amplified these calls on the outside. Republicans would have been screaming for an invasion, and the public would have been on their side. Clinton could barely hold them all back in the ‘90s; after 9/11, would Gore have stood a chance?
Here it’s worth remembering Gore’s own history. In the 1980s, he made his name as a senator and presidential candidate by positioning himself as one of his party’s foremost hawks. One of the reasons, in fact, that Clinton put him on the Democratic ticket in 1992 was Gore’s vote for the Gulf War, which most Democrats had opposed. You could argue that Gore was a changed man by 2001 and 2002, and that he saw the world in a fundamentally different way, and maybe that’s true.
But it should be noted that when he announced his opposition to Bush’s war push in the fall of ’02, Gore endorsed the basic goal of removing Hussein and securing his (supposed) WMD stockpiles. What he objected to was more the go-it-alone nature of Bush’s approach. In other words, you could also argue that Gore, still stung by the 2000 election outcome, may have been motivated in some way by his desire to stage a big, principled fight with Bush — and that a different result in ’00 might have produced a different, more hawkish response from Gore, one that would have led to … an invasion of Iraq.
Or we can give Gore the benefit of the doubt and say that he would have delivered the same speech opposing a war with Iraq even if he had been president — and that he would have resisted overwhelming pressure from Republicans, the media, the general public, and even some members of his administration. Would the country’s war fever have eventually died down until Americans gratefully concluded that Gore had been right all along? Sure, it’s possible. But it seems more likely that the same taunts that haunted Bush throughout the ’90s — “He should have finished the job!” — would have then dogged Gore, and that the political consequences would have been profound. Maybe Gore would have pushed through some new type of sanctions, or a few more rounds of weapons inspections. Hussein would have just thumbed his nose at all of this, and every time he did, the chorus in America would have grown louder: Why is President Gore letting this tyrant push us around — especially when it could lead to another 9/11?!
If the 1991 Gulf War is what shook America’s Vietnam syndrome, then the occupation of Iraq is what shook the hubris that followed the Gulf War — and made Gore and Clinton and George H.W. Bush look prophetic. But without the Iraq war, Gore’s wisdom probably would have gone unappreciated for years to come. If anything, it would have been a serious political liability — the sort of thing that his Republican opponent in 2004 (John McCain? Bush again, anointed by a GOP still furious over the “stolen” election of 2000?) would have been well-positioned to exploit.
Obviously, it’s impossible to know what would have happened if Gore had been president on 9/11. But here’s guessing that, one way or another, America would have gotten the invasion of Iraq that it had been itching for since 1991.
Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki
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Former Vice President and Current TV chairman, Al Gore, made an appearance on his own channel Tuesday to decry the state of American politics.
He told “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann that we need an “American Spring” like the Arab Spring, with our own version of Tahrir Square, to reinvigorate political activism in America. However, Gore made clear with a number of qualifications that he was not calling for revolution. Rather than advocating taking to the streets, he seemed to be calling for more Americans to get online to make their political views heard — a far cry from the revolutionary activity in the Arab world.
Gore also emphasized that he does not see the Tea Party as an example of grassroots political activism, largely because the movement has the support of billionaires like the Koch brothers pushing agendas in Washington.
Natasha Lennard covers the Occupy movement for Salon. A British-born, Brooklyn-based journalist, she has been covering Occupy Wall Street since before the first sleeping bag was unrolled in Zuccotti Park. One of the first journalists arrested at an Occupy action, she has managed to enrage Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You can follow her on Twitter (@natashalennard), and email her any Occupy updates/videos/ideas to natasha.lennard@gmail.com
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Former Vice President Al Gore introduces Vice President Joe Biden at the annual Tennessee Democratic Party Jackson Day on Friday, July 16, 2010 in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)(Credit: Mark Humphrey)
The sweep and complexity of Al Gore’s 7,000-word climate-change jeremiad in Rolling Stone, making news because he chides President Obama, in itself partly exonerates the president. As Gore indicts the media, corporate leaders, both political parties and by extension voters for their inaction on the deadly challenge, it seems almost churlish to single out one man for blame, even if he is the president: Look at what he’s up against!
The fact is, Gore didn’t single out the president in “Climate of Denial”; most of his piece indicts the media for indulging in “debate” about whether climate change is real and human-made, when the science is unanimous that it is, as well as turning news into entertainment, to the detriment of serious reporting on global threats, in search of bigger audiences. He also calls out Fox News as a 24/7 purveyor of disinformation and Republican propaganda, on the heels of Jon Stewart’s great takedown last night. But Gore’s critique is just, like, too complicated, and kind of a downer, and maybe hits too close to home. So a lot of outlets are just saying: “Hey! Look over there! It’s not us — It’s Obama! Fight!”
What Gore is ultimately saying about Obama, that he “has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change,” has been said by plenty of other advocates on plenty of other issues, particularly about domestic economic issues. It points to an inconvenient truth about politics right now: President Obama came to power with a mandate for “change,” but no one agreed about exactly what that meant, and in these first two-plus years, on divisive issues, he’s tried to split the difference. He and his team assumed that the biggest problem in Washington was dysfunctional partisan gridlock, and if you committed to compromise on the big problems, you could “do big things.”
But with a Republican Party whose strategy consisted of saying no to everything, no matter how reasonable, that approach didn’t work. The Obama team also thought they could make progress by cutting side deals with the powerful interests that block change, promising big healthcare interests, for instance, that the public option was off the table. Healthcare reform ultimately passed, but without a public option or other methods to contain costs, and the side deals contributed to public cynicism about the process and the product. Likewise on the failure to pass a climate change bill, Gore says, “Senate advocates — including one Republican — felt abandoned when the president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return.”
Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson’s story, linked from the Gore piece, fleshes out that disappointment. After a strong climate bill passed the House, the Senate took up the issue, and a “tripartite” team of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham made progress. But advocates said “the administration applied the same backroom approach it took to health care reform. Instead of waging a public debate to pit the American people against the corporate polluters, Obama gave the polluters a seat at the negotiating table. In private, big energy firms were offered sweetheart deals to acquiesce to the climate bill, including expanded offshore drilling for oil giants like BP and taxpayer subsidies for coal and nuclear interests that outstripped those for clean energy.” The deal fell apart anyway, and just after Obama unilaterally announced that his administration would extend offshore drilling, without any climate change concessions on the part of industry, came news of the BP oil spill, which ensured that coddling oil companies would be remembered as a bipartisan folly.
The question for Obama, and for Democrats more broadly, now that compromise and co-optation hasn’t worked is: What next? On one level I react to complaints about the president failing to use his “bully pulpit” with a little weariness: More speeches? Really? We need action. And I sympathize with the president about the lack of backing in Congress for bold change. But at the heart of the many calls for Obama to take the lead in defining the dire problems we face — on climate change, on income inequality, on the troubled economy more broadly — is a deep and widely shared frustration: The president hasn’t seized a moment of profound crisis and opportunity to tell Americans exactly why the status quo isn’t working anymore, except for a tiny sliver of America, and what we’re going to do about it.
Right before I read Gore’s piece I finished an article by Mike Tomasky that made almost the same exact case on the issue of economic inequality. Peter Whoriskey’s terrific Washington Post report, “Breakaway Wealth,” got everyone’s attention: It’s unconscionable that the share of wealth that goes to the richest .01 percent of Americans has shot from 2.5 percent in the mid-1970s to more than 10 percent today. That inequality threatens the foundations of our country. It’s part of why we have an economic crisis in the first place: Unemployment is sky high, wages are stagnant (or falling, for those at the bottom), people are using services that drain tax revenue instead of doing work that produces it. The concentration of economic power leads that elite to have more political power, which they use to protect their economic power. This threatens democracy, even if they don’t talk about it at Tea Party events.
Tomasky concludes: “God forbid also that a Democrat — the president, let’s say — make this argument and draw these connections for the American people … Mr. President, Democrats: it would seem that now is the time.” Paul Krugman has likewise noted, going back to the debate over the inadequate size of the 2009 stimulus: OK, maybe the president is right, and he couldn’t have gotten more money from conservative Democrats and Republicans. Still: If he’d made a stronger case about the broken economy, raging economic inequality, and the imperative to spend government money now to get things moving again, the worst that could have happened is that he’d lose, but Americans would know what Democrats believe we’re up against — and what we believed would work, even if Republicans blocked it. And who knows, a rousing call to bold action might have galvanized Americans to demand more from Washington. We’ll never know.
The frustrating thing about the lack of a bold approach to climate change is that action on this massive threat has the potential to ease several problems at once, not just environmental ones: Massive public and private investment in alternative energy and conservation technologies could spur a renaissance in research, development and manufacturing, and provide jobs at every level, from top scientists to underskilled workers weather-proofing public buildings. And of course, reducing our dependence on gulf oil would enhance national security by making intervention in that region less tempting, giving us more freedom to pursue both human rights and genuine American interests in oil-producing states.
But it would also require that Democrats take on the people who profit from the status quo, and as Gore lays out, that’s not easy. I wish Gore had talked a little about his own role with the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and ’90s, pushing his party to be more friendly to business, which is part of what’s led to the sad reality that both parties compete to serve corporate America. I don’t say that to be insulting; I’m sure Gore has some important insights about what was right, and wrong, about that endeavor. We live with its legacy today. He makes one point I’ll quibble with: that the slow but certain demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should inspire climate-change activists, because it shows the power of hard work and activist organizing to do what’s right. With no disrespect to the legions of DADT advocates whose work I admire: Strong advocacy wasn’t the whole story. DADT fell for two primary reasons: Americans are coming to accept gay rights more broadly, and it was a win-win solution. The military gets more soldiers, and gay people get more rights. Maybe most important: It didn’t cost corporate America a dime. It didn’t require higher taxes. It was a tough sell but far easier than what Gore is proposing. We’re winning the social issues, and losing on the economic ones.
I recently ran across a comment Franklin Delano Roosevelt made on the eve of becoming president in 1933, when the Depression shocked the country into reappraising virtually everything about itself .”All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified … [I]t needs to be reaffirmed at this juncture that the United States is one organic entity, that no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all.” Obama took office in just that sort of time, and sympathetic critics, like Gore, wish he’d seized the sort of moment FDR described. For better or worse, though, it’s not too late: The climate change crisis gets worse every day, and the economic crisis isn’t going away any time soon either.
I discussed the Gore piece with Rolling Stone’s Eric Bates on Hardball today:
This frame grab from MSNBC video, shows Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" on Jan. 21, 2011. Olbermann returned from one last commercial break on "Countdown" to tell viewers it was his last broadcast, and read a James Thurber short story in a three-minute exit statement. Simultaneously, MSNBC e-mailed a statement that "MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract." The network thanked him and said, "we wish him well in his future endeavors." Neither MSNBC President Phil Griffin, Olbermann nor his manager responded to requests to explain an exit so abrupt that Olbermann's face was still being featured on an MSNBC promotional ad 30 minutes after he had said goodbye. (AP Photo/MSNBC) NO SALES, MANDATORY CREDIT(Credit: AP)
UPDATE (11:07 a.m.)
Like a new media champ, Keith Olbermann announced his new job on Twitter:
Greetings from Keith Olbermann, Chief News Officer of Current Media! And awayyyyyy we go! #FOK
Olbermann will both host and executive produce — this is key — an hour-long prime-time show five nights a week on Current. In addition to this anchor role, the sometimes tough-to-manage Olbermann will help overhaul Current’s news strategy and hold equity in the company.
Nothing is more vital to a free America than a free media, and nothing is more vital to my concept of a free media than news produced independently of corporate interference. In Current Media, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have created the model truth-seeking entity. The opportunity to partner with Al, Joel and Mark Rosenthal makes this the most exciting venture in my career.
Reactions so far have been positive. David Shuster tweeted almost immediately after the news:
Brilliant business move, excellent journalism effort by currentTV in hiring @keitholbermann. The prime time show sounds terrific.
Also via Twitter, Mother Jones’ Washington editor David Corn remarked:
Right now on Current TV: “Viral Videos,” featuring “Keyboard Cat.” Later, “Kill It, Cook It, Eat It.” KO will be rebuilding a network-again
————-
Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host turned tweeter about the weather, will announce his next move today. According to the New York Times’ Media Decoder blog, Olbermann will team up with Al Gore’s Current TV in some sort of Internet-meets-teevee jujitsu. Since the former “Countdown” host is contractually forbidden from working in television, Current seems like an interesting choice.
Started in 2005 by Al Gore and cronies, Current TV originally set out to break the cable mold with a mixture of user-generated content, Internet-friendly short segments called “pods,” and some sort of partnership with Google. These ideas never really worked out, and after massive layoffs during the recession, Current could use some new wind in its sails.
Enter Keith. His harried departure from MSNBC left many viewers, fans and even foes wondering what the polarizing pundit would do next. And let’s not forget the great gossip about who would fill his slot at MSNBC. A new Keith Olbermann show on Current TV would both offer Olbermann the independence he longs for and the flexibility to work on the Internet in the near term.
Of course, we’re still in the gossip arena, and speculation abounds. The Times blog post came after an announcement Monday that Olbermann would announce “the next chapter in his remarkable career” Tuesday at 11 a.m., less than 24 hours before Current TV is set to make a big announcement to advertisers. This is dizzying. It’s entirely possible that Olbermann, who once wrote a column for Salon, will announce something entirely different, that he is doing his own thing. In a way, the crumbs lead in that direction as Olbermann has already set up a new Twitter account (@FOKNewsChannel, or “Friends of Keith News Channel”) and someone registered a pretty obvious domain name (TheOlbermannShow.com).
Keith and Current are not the weirdest pair ever. Since Al Gore invented the Internet — we couldn’t help ourselves from that joke — what better place to experiment than with his channel. The politics make sense, the brands make sense, and everyone’s a little sick of speculating.
So, Mark Kirk voted for cap-and-trade in 2009, when he was in the House of Representatives. But then he ran for Senate, and so he had to decide that cap-and-trade was tyrannical and the entire idea of regulating carbon is socialism because there’s no such thing as global warming. Now Kirk wants to block the EPA from regulating emissions themselves.
Another Republican blasted from both sides of the spectrum for his record on emissions, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, said he is “not terribly concerned” about taking heat from green groups for his criticism of EPA action on carbon emissions.
“The consensus behind the climate change bill collapsed and then further deteriorated with the personal and political collapse of Vice President [Al] Gore,” Kirk said in a brief interview last week.
I think this means that when Al Gore split with his longtime wife, Tipper, in 2010, there was no longer overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. It just makes sense.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Al Gore concedes the 2000 presidential election 
Al Gore 
Former Vice President Al Gore introduces Vice President Joe Biden at the annual Tennessee Democratic Party Jackson Day on Friday, July 16, 2010 in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)(Credit: Mark Humphrey) 
This frame grab from MSNBC video, shows Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" on Jan. 21, 2011. Olbermann returned from one last commercial break on "Countdown" to tell viewers it was his last broadcast, and read a James Thurber short story in a three-minute exit statement. Simultaneously, MSNBC e-mailed a statement that "MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract." The network thanked him and said, "we wish him well in his future endeavors." Neither MSNBC President Phil Griffin, Olbermann nor his manager responded to requests to explain an exit so abrupt that Olbermann's face was still being featured on an MSNBC promotional ad 30 minutes after he had said goodbye. (AP Photo/MSNBC) NO SALES, MANDATORY CREDIT(Credit: AP) 
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (L) and his wife Tipper leave after holding a news conference in Palo Alto, California after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in this October 12, 2007 file photo. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, have announced their separation after 40 years of marriage, according to media reports on June 1, 2010. REUTERS/Kimberly White/Files (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS PROFILE)(Credit: © Kimberly White / Reuters) 
