Just as last week's Dixie Chicks (ahem, with balls) cover story in Time magazine was expanding on an earlier plug in their Time 100 issue, in this week's editions, reporter Karen Tumulty expands on her earlier "movie star" plug for Al Gore. The headline for this four-page package is "Lights, Camera, Al Gore!" (Yes, an exclamation point.) And: "The ex-president is enjoying an unlikely heyday as a movie star. All that buzz invites the question: Will he audition again for President?"
A "movie star"? May we remind Time's headline writers that the Gore movie debuted in just four theaters and grossed $281,330? (Nice pre-screen average, but c'mon, it's a political event.) May we remind Time that almost no one is going to say "hey, kids, get your popcorn, it's time to watch the Al Gore global warming slide show"? By this standard, we could look up the weekend box-office charts and claim Michael J. Pagan was a "movie star."
"All that buzz" about the Gore movie happens to be coming almost entirely from the liberal media and their environmentalist pals. Tumulty claimed that he was the press sensation of Cannes, generating "the kind of interest that entertainment reporters usually bestow on people named Halle and Beyonce." (I'm guessing they didn't think Gore was a hottie, so it wasn't exactly the same "kind of interest.") Then there was X-Men star Hugh Jackman saying to Gore he looked forward to his movie, which launched Tumulty into a flight of her fancy:
Then again, Gore's new movie has someing of a mutant-action-hero plotline of its own. It's the tale of a scorned, washed-up politician transformed into a laptop-wielding ninja whose PowerPoint could rescue the planet from the forces of greed and indifference.
In the post-Katrina media-bias aftermath and with Bush's low approval ratings, it's apparently time to realize that we miss Al Gore, or so his former paid spokesmen think we should. Former Gore aide Chris Lehane claimed: "People are now looking at him through the prism of the last six years and realizing that he had and has a lot to offer."
Earth to Lehane: This is a man who thought the national security threat of the new century was not al-Qaeda. It was the Escalade.
Tumulty cannot manage to describe the left-wing ideological tinge of the "new" Al Gore, with the maniacal MoveOn.org anti-war speeches. Oh, and she didn't label MoveOn either: "Gore is position better than just about anyone to tap the enormous, near-instant fund-raising potential of the Internet should he choose to, considering the following he has generated among bloggers and with the Net-based political organization MoveOn.org."
Tumulty also plugged Gore's Current TV channel late in the piece, reporting it's been picked up by Comcast for its digital tier and will reach 17 million homes this week, said his business partner Joel Hyatt. "We are just on fire," Hyatt told Time. That's an insensitive metaphor in these times of supposedly catastrophic warming, don't you think?
