You can sense the desperation in the Al Gore camp. Liberals in the press are now complaining that media somehow hate Gore.
"For Gore, there's zero tolerance for anything but the literal truth," whines Margaret Carlson. "If these slips had been made by any other politician, they would have caused barely a peep," snips Jonathan Alter.
How much must be overlooked to claim the media have "zero tolerance" for Gore's lies, errors, and scandals? Let's help them along with a partial list of things the media have invariably ignored or downplayed from the man whose every speech is a clinic in truth-parsing or gobbledy-gook.
1. When my sister died of cancer, I vowed to fight the tobacco industry until my last breath.
2. Which didn't stop me from bringing tobacco industry hired gun Carter Eskew to help run my presidential campaign..
3. I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
4. But I can't tell you anything about those e-mails, because I'm not an expert on computers.
5. That Buddhist Temple event was not a fundraiser.
6. It was a donor maintenance event.
7. It was not technically a fundraiser, since the money changed hands after I left.
8. I must have had too much iced tea and taken too many bathroom breaks when they discussed how I'd be breaking the rules about fundraising from my office.
9. I'm proud we're holding this hearing (1985) into the disgusting filthy lyrics coming out of the record companies.
10. I was against holding that hearing into filthy lyrics, and I apologize.
11. Tipper and I are proud of our fight against filthy lyrics.
12. I'm a really big fan of the rock band Hole. ("Hey look me over/I'm where I want to be/ A walking study in demonology.")
13. I will fight for America's working families. I'm no longer throwing your family out of my dilapidated rental property and into the street, Mrs. Mayberry.
14. What Juanita Broaddrick interview? I must have missed that.
15. I'm against a nuclear test-ban treaty.
16. I've favored a nuclear test-ban treaty for 20 years.
17. Federal judges guilty of perjury must be impeached.
18. Presidents guilty of perjury are among our nation's greatest presidents.
19. I support the Defense of Marriage Act.
20. I support the Vermont Supreme Court ordering the legislature to make gay marriage legal.
21. Jesus and Mary were homeless people.
22. My mother-in-law's drugs are more expensive than my dog's. A Democratic stat sheet told me so.
23. The internal combustion engine is a greater enemy than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
24. A leopard can't change his stripes; e pluribus unum means "out of one, many"; and isn't Michael Jackson an amazing basketball player?
25. Abortion is the taking of a human life.
26. I have always been pro-choice.
27. This little old lady Winifred Skinner here had to walk the streets picking up cans to afford to eat because of high drug costs. Her story was
completely spontaneous and unsolicited.
28. I support socialized health care.
29. I support a smaller government.
30. George W. Bush doesn't have the experience to be President.
31. I've never questioned Bush's experience.
32. I was lulled to sleep as a child by a (1975) union commercial jingle.
33. Actually, it was a 1901 labor anthem.
34. Actually, it was all just a joke. Didn't you hear them laugh?
35. I'll fight for you against Big Oil.
36. Bill, please sign the largest privatization in history over to Occidental Petroleum.
37. I will not attack my opponent as a bumbler.
38. My spokesmen call him a bumbler, but they don't speak for me.
39. Tipper and I were the inspiration for Love Story.
40. Tipper wasn't, but the error was made by the Nashville Tennessean.
41. This poor student in Sarasota, Florida doesn't have a desk to sit in.
42. She does, but the error was made by the local paper.
43. I went with FEMA director James Lee Witt to the Parker County, Texas fires in 1996.
44. It was the deputy director of FEMA, in 1998, in Houston, on a fundraising trip. It was just the details I got wrong.
45. I'm not meeting with Al Sharpton. I'm just heading over to Karenna's apartment on a strictly personal visit.)
46. I've been a part of discussions on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since the beginning, two years before I came to Congress.
47. I wrote crucial lines in Hubert Humphrey's acceptance speech at the 1968 Democratic convention.
48. I co-sponsored McCain-Feingold in the Senate, after I left the Senate.
49. I can't think of any lies President Clinton has told in his first two years in office.
50. There's never been a time when I've said something untrue.