the blog quebecois

Walter Russell Mead:

But if “Climate of Denial” doesn’t teach us how environmentalists can have more success, it does help us understand what’s wrong with [former VP Al] Gore. The essay begins with one of his earliest childhood memories when young Master Gore (as southern boys from the better white families were then still addressed) was taken to a professional wrestling match at the Fork River Elementary School gym in Elmswood, Tennessee.

The boy was perplexed: the wrestlers seemed to be really fighting, but the whole thing somehow seemed scripted. Worse, the referees weren’t doing their jobs. When the bad guys hit the good guys with a metal chair, the referees were somehow not paying attention, but when, as Gore puts it, “the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him.”