So, as you probably know, the Nobel prizes, that century-long boon from a notorious arms manufacturer‘s deathbed pangs of guilt, were announced over the past few days. As the surprise winner of the literature prize, Doris Lessing, best known for The Golden Notebook. (Profoundly ungracious about the news was lit-critic Harold Bloom: “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable…fourth-rate science fiction.” Snob much, Prof. Bloom?) And, following in the footsteps of such well-regarded peacemongers as Charles Dawes, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and, of course, the inventor of dynamite himself, the Nobel Peace Prize goes to Al Gore, for his work in emphasizing the imminent catastrophe threatened by global climate change. “I want this prize to have everyone…every human being, asking what they should do.” Well, congratulations on the win, Mr. Vice-President. Hopefully, this will further encourage America and the world community to get serious about global warming. But please — please — don’t run.
4 thoughts on “Nobel Warming.”
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Kevin, if your only choices were Al Gore or Hillary Clinton, who would you choose?
Hey scully…it’s hard to conceive of a real-world scenario where I’d be forced to vote for one or the other. But, taking the hypothetical as given, I’d vote for Clinton, for the following reasons:
1. Gore’s been no more a friend to campaign finance reform than Hillary has. So that’s a wash.
2. Clinton plays hardball, to be sure, but she’s yet to show anything near the level of exaggeration and prevarication Gore indulged in in 2000. (Yet being the operative word.)
3. I’m not sold on either of them, as you know, but Clinton would have the advantage of being America’s first woman president. In this choice of least-palatable options, tie goes to the history-maker.
Gore’s plus-side, and it’s a big one, is that he was against the Iraq war from the start, while Clinton, for all her vaunted “experience,” just went along for the ride. (Tbh, I still can’t figure out why she’s considered the “experience” candidate in the first place.) Regardless, Gore’s judgment has seemed suspect in the past as well. Just look how he ran his 2000 campaign, and/or handled its legal aftermath.
All this being said, if either Clinton or Gore won the 2008 nomination, I’m 97% likely to vote for them in the general election (pending a 3rd-party candidate I was really, really enthused about…but there don’t seem to be any of those on the horizon, and there’s only so often one can tilt at windmills.)
Still, I’m glad there’s a wide field of more palatable candidates — Obama, Edwards, Dodd, Kucinich, Biden — so I can vote my conscience in the primary, at least.
well, gore may have won the vote of the majority of nobel-selectors, but did you see what happened afterwards?
Thanks, Kevin. Well, put. I don’t have anything against Hillary other than her being so polarizing within her own party. That scares me. The right doesn’t have to work to drum up hatred for her, and the left either loves her or hates her. But we had this convo in July 🙂
I’d still like to see a Clark/Edwards or a Edwards/Obama ticket.