I guess what Al Gore does best is to pull a lot of information together in a cogent meta-analysis. He did that with the Inconvenient Truth. He took information about Global Warming, which was just very esoteric and unstructured data that scientists, who had seen the effects of global warming while they were studying other things, had been warning Congress about. Gore put it in a coherent package that could be presented to the masses, so much so that people were able to understand it and feel motivated by it. It was quite a feat!
It has been right wing rhetoric to brand Global Warning as a political argument, bad science, or premature. There were also people saying that the earth was in the mists of another ice age, and of course they said the Sun is going to explode soon. Such arguments were successful in leaving people so confused that nothing would be done about Global Warming in this country. Gore shifted the scales.
This time around, Gore takes on the murky topic of the post 9-11 American government, and the culture that created it. He takes all the disjointed facts out there on the Government (Bush Administration) and tries to make sense of it.
Gore goes at it with a style that mixes history, law, science and current events together. He contends that corporations and special interests are the highest bidder that controls American politics whether it is a Republican or a Democratic in office. He goes further as to suggest that American politics has become a 30 second television ad, which are extreme expensive to produce and show. Politicians spend little time doing their jobs of governing, and instead they spend most of their time fund-raising. Often, they don’t read the bills, attend debates or vote.
Because of the age of Television, especially Cable Television, the political debate in this country has been cut off from the American people. This wasn't always the case. He cites copious amounts of documents and historical records, such as the Federalist papers, to highlight that a national debate is essential to survival of the United States of American as per the founding fathers. Since, television is a one-way communication medium, people don’t feel like they don’t have a say in government, and in turn, become apathetic. He shows data to support this idea.
Gore describes the evolution of the political debate over the life of the United States, and he shows how it is getting more and more abstract. He carefully describes the brain washing techniques used in modern day cable news programs that report little of the news and gives a lot of opinions set along specific political lines. He illustrates this by speaking of the invention of the radio, which had everything to do with the raise of Hitler and Mussolini. Both dictators programmed their audience with the gravitas of their voice transmitted over radio. The same is happening with the cable news problems and talk radio. Both not only give their version of the news, they tell their audience how to feel about it.
The difference from watching the news and reading the newspaper is that when you read a newspaper the information goes through a mental filtering process by the nature of reading. When you watch the news, you are being manipulated through a more primitive brain function, you don’t think about if you agree with it or how you feel about it, because it bypass prefrontal cortex (where higher ordered brain functioning occurs) and the message goes straight to emotional knowledge.
Al Gore who has a much higher opinion of President George W. Bush than most Americans at this time, painfully goes over the copious amount of constitutional crimes that are occurring and utter incompetence of the Bush administration.
Gore makes one of the first public statements that I have heard, which states the 9-11 could have been avoided. He cites reports that were given to president Bush in august of 2001 that warned of the 9-11 attacks. Apparently Bush responded with mass negligence. He dismissed the reports and told the agents that they had covered their ass, and continued with his vacation. Gore states that when reports were delivered to the Clinton-Gore administration, that an emergency meeting were held, and every possible scenario would be considered. Bush did nothing.
He cites that Paul O’Neil, an early Bush cabinet member, had stated that from the start of the Bush administration, George W. Bush looked for any excuse to invade Iraq. He goes further, and cited Paul Wolfowitz’s statement that the argument of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was picked by a focus group that it determined it would be the most acceptable story that the American people take to support an invasion Iraq. So there was never a belief at any time that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was just a marketing strategy by the administration.
George Bush has replaced much of the government officers with inept political appointees who make their decisions based on political ideals. One of the greatest American disasters, Hurricane Katrina, was a handled along political lines that failed the American people. Without a press to keep the Bush administration honest, and a government that keeps being undermined by the executive branch, the Bush administration has been changing the government of the United States to not be a representative democracy and instead it is transforming it to be more of a dictatorship. Constitutional breeches have been common, with a distain for this country being land of law. The executive branch sees itself as being above the law, and most people don’t seem to care because they feel they have no say. The only salvation to save our republic , as Gore sees it, is the Internet. At this point in time anyone can give feedback to this country’s national debate via blogs, websites and youtube like videos. He leaves with a warning that the Internet should stay free and that the national American political debate must come back to the people.
Overall, this is a great book. Often it is difficult to read because it reveals an America that we feel, but don’t truly understand. The book is written in a manner that is open to anyone. I truly recommend this book to everyone.
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