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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Hurst who wrote (13660)	12/4/1999 4:51:00 PM
From: jimpit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13994

American Spectator spectator.org 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. spectator.org Copyright ¸ 1999 The American Spectator. All rights reserved.