American Spectator
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CAMPAIGN 2000 SPECTATOR
by Byron York
Is Gore Nuts?
Posted: 3 December 1999
Years ago, when I was a young reporter in
Washington, I came across a little scandal called
Watergate. I wrote the first stories about it. I was the
one who started it all.
Now what would you think if I, in all seriousness,
told you that? After all, even if you weren't
conversant with the facts of Watergate, you could
easily find out that I did not in fact discover the
scandal, that I did not write the first stories about it,
and that I was not the one who started it all.
At which point you would think that I was, at the
least, a little weird. Or that I had a problem with the
truth. But not a mild, garden-variety problem with the
truth -- say, one in which I embellished my r‚sum‚ a
bit, perhaps claimed that I had a degree from a
school when in fact I had left before graduation. No,
if I told you the Watergate story, you would suspect
that I had a serious and compulsive urge to lie,
without any concern that my lies would be
discovered. And you might well reason that my
actions were symptomatic of some deeper problem.
Which leads to the question: Why isn't anyone saying
that about Al Gore?
This week the vice president, speaking at a high
school in Concord, New Hampshire, went out of his
way to tout his already well-known environmental
record. "I found a little place in upstate New York
called Love Canal," he told the students, referring to
the neighborhood that sat atop a toxic waste dump. "I
had the first hearing on the issue. I was the one that
[sic] started it all."
As it turns out, he wasn't. Gore did not discover
Love Canal. By the time he held hearings on the
issue, the place had been declared a disaster area
and everybody had moved out. And, needless to say,
Gore was not the one who started it all.
Gore's statement came after similarly fantastical
claims about his role in the novel "Love Story," his
responsibility for the birth of the Internet, and several
less spectacular misrepresentations. Taken together,
those incidents seem to indicate that something
strange is going on inside Al Gore's brain. Yet most
public comment about the issue has been
light-hearted, with a variety of pundits treating the
vice president's "misstatements" as amusing
anecdotes.
They're more than that. Gore's pattern of making
outlandish and easily refutable claims says something
about him -- although just what that is is not entirely
clear. Why would the vice president tell
preposterous tales that can be quickly disproved?
Can he not distinguish the real from the imagined? Is
he trying to commit political suicide? Does he think
we're morons? I don't know. But none of those things
would be a healthy character trait for a president.
A few weeks ago, National Review's Richard
Brookhiser published a provocative piece in which
he theorized that Gore's actions -- his strange rants,
inappropriate shouts, and animatronic movements --
suggest that the vice president is depressed. Maybe
that's so. But his compulsive and obvious lies may
point to something even more serious. Simply put,
Gore may be quietly going nuts.
Whatever the case, it's not a joke. Political observers
should stop trading quips about Gore's gaffes and try
to understand that there might be something terribly
wrong with the man.
Byron York is a writer with The American Spectator.
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