Asserting that the most important concern of your opponents supports your position is actually very common in argument, especially the arguments that lawyers and politicians like. I think it's a learned behavior.

The problem is, enlisting an argument on your own side validates the argument. In that way the Dems completely validated the War on Terror, and before it basically every other war, even the phony symbolic wars like the "War on Drugs."

Plus, disingenuously enlisting arguments you don't really think that highly of on your own side makes you look phony and unprincipled. Fancy that. Being phony and unprincipled will cause people to think you are phony and unprincipled.

Surely, the final sentence or two can't be a surprise to you. After all, Gore was a consenting adult participant in the Clinton administration.

Surely we can still support someone's views on one thing and disagree on another?

We all know Al Gore is a dickwad, but this post gets an A+ for incorporating Rage Guy.

We all know Al Gore is a dickwad, but this post gets an A+ for incorporating Rage Guy.

And I get an F- for not being able to competently post a comment.

Gore is just sore because he can’t get a piece of the Iranian nuclear action like he has back here in the States with our own nuclear industry.

Far as I can tell about 80% of the liberals on the planet are just as convinced of Iran's building nuclear weapons as they were of Saddam's, with less supporting evidence. Lucy, football, etc.

this is the disease you get from making out with jim woolsey. it's nasty.

That is an alarming image; it communicates a lot.

I Was With Al Gore Right Up to the Moment He Turned Into A Giant Dickwad...

1976?

He was kind of being a dickwad as soon as he mentioned, "dependent on foreign oil". That's an appealing to American's jingoism. The comment about Iran is just the logical extension of that "fuck all you foreigners" attitude.

"Dependent on foreign oil" must be a lot worse than "dependent on foreign tantalum", or foreign bismuth, or foreign antimony, or foreign samarium.

But whether Iran is or isn't trying to make atomic bombs, they are saying that they are. That should count for something.

Probably it would be more sensible to worry about already existing Pakistani bombs, but Pakistan doesn't have oil. Or the Russian ones. Russia does have oil, but worrying about Russian bombs is very tiring. Or the Israeli ones.

Was JUST listening to the great Frank Zappa( May God rest his soul).
While I was down
In W D.C.
Certain folks( Al & Tipper)
Were NOT glad
To see Me
I was just tryin'
To get out the vote
When some little weasel(Al Gore)
Must have dropped them a note
It said,
"Check out the politics
Practiced by this Olaf,
AND if they ain't just right,
Feed him confinement loaf".

"Probably it would be more sensible to worry about already existing Pakistani bombs . . . Or the Russian ones . . . . Or the Israeli ones."

Or, for a change a pace, we could worry about the American nukes--you know, the only ones that ever have been used on people, and the ones that have been threatened against people whole orders of magnitude more often than any other nukes. Our threats haven't been poorly translated metaphorical rhetoric either (see Juan Cole on Ahmadinejad), but very real military threats.

The curious may learn all about this in a fine book, To Win a Nuclear War by Keku and Axelrod. Especially recommended are the hilarious pages about Harry Truman threatening to destroy the USSR in 1946-47 and then finding out (threat already made) that he didn't have as many nukes as he thought he had. Oops.

Those fun-loving nutty Generals in the Pentagon never could get Presidents (even Ike) to be as aggressive as they recommended. See Strangelove, Dr. I wonder why.

"Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran" IS The Democratic Party line as well as the Republican line. Obama promotes it as well as ALL Good Democrats, such as Al Gore.

"But whether Iran is or isn't trying to make atomic bombs, they are saying that they are. That should count for something."

Say what? When have they said this? They say they're pursuing civilian nuclear power programs, not weapons.

saurabh: Agreed. The Iranians maybe pressing it to the edge but they sure aren't begging for "life in the stoneage".

But whether Iran is or isn't trying to make atomic bombs, they are saying that they are. That should count for something.

I'm so old I remember back when Saddam Hussein "said he had WMD" (Joseph Lieberman). Like Iran, Saddam accomplished this by saying over and over again that Iraq had no WMD.

The owners of this country won't accept that the Iranians could remove their chosen Dictator and then 20 odd years later fool them again with the double agent Chalibi.

N E sums is what is probably going on (Gore is conceding a point to make a separate one) and if Rob Payne is right (Gore is payed off by American nuclear power companies), that covers it all.