Al Gore’s new book “The Assault on Reason,” was released today. Gore is making the rounds with book signings, interviews, etc. Sadly, I found out too late that he was here in L.A. last night. I would have loved to have gone to hear him speak. Regardless, Gore’s new book is on my must read soon list:

E.J. Dionne has a piece in the WaPo today about a 40 minute phone interview he did with Gore yesterday (and Dionne doesn’t think he’ll run). Here’s some quips…

It’s entertaining to talk to Gore these days because he’s so clearly enjoying himself. (That’s probably why he won’t run for president.) During a 40-minute telephone interview yesterday, he did not speak as if there were focus-grouped sentences dancing around in his head. Nor did he worry about saying things that some consultant would fret about for weeks afterward.

For example, when Gore is asked if any of the Democrats running for president were changing the system he holds in such low esteem, he pulls no punches. “They’re good people trapped in a bad system,” he says, “and I think it’s the system that needs to be changed and I don’t see them changing it.” The campaign dialogue so far, he says, has not been “very enriching or illuminating” in “either party.” But, no, that doesn’t mean he’s going to run, though he never completely shuts the door. It’s part of the fun he’s having.

He ascribes the failure to have a full-throated debate on Iraq back in 2002 — when he spoke out against the looming war, to much nasty jeering from the right — to the administration’s decision to politicize the issue before the midterm elections, but also to “meekness” and “timidity” in both “the legislative branch of government” and in “the press corps.”

“A lot of people were afraid of being accused of being unpatriotic,” he says. “One of the symptoms of this problem — the diminishing role for reason, fact and logic — is that what rushes in to fill the vacuum are extreme partisanship, ideology, fundamentalism and extreme nationalism.”

“If the Bush administration came to mind as you read those words,” Dionne says, “Gore wouldn’t object.”

Historians who need a catalogue of what went wrong after, oh, Dec. 12, 2000, the day of a certain U.S. Supreme Court decision, will find it all in his book.

Gore, so gracious after that unfortunate court ruling, lets it rip against Bush on Iraq, civil liberties, global warming and much else. Gore writes of “something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, and his lack of curiosity. . . .”

That sentiment will speak to the multitudes disgusted with the Bush presidency — and draw vituperation from the same people who accused Gore of trying to “steal” the 2000 election simply because he wanted Florida’s votes recounted.

Now, 7 years after the Supreme Court decision installing Bush as president, Dionne says, “the mood is quite different. Why? Stand up and take a bow, bloggers — We are making a difference:

… partly because of the rise of a new Internet political community that Gore wants to protect from the designs of big companies. Say what you will, the blogs and other online gathering places do promote a culture of engagement rather than passivity. The raucous back-and-forth they encourage looks, at least sometimes, like real, live democratic politics.

But the larger change is that the very process Gore describes — of propaganda taken as fact, of slogans taken as arguments, of repetition substituting for logic and, yes, of lies and half-truths taken as truth — is now well-recognized. What worked against Gore during the recount and what worked for the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war doesn’t work anymore. That is an advance for democracy and for reason.

Gore, to his credit, won’t talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

The N.Y. Times has a review of Gore’s new book, “The Assault on Reason“: “Al Gore Speaks of a Nation in Danger.”

… this book shows a fiery, throw-caution-to-the winds Al Gore, who, whether or not he runs for the White House again, has decided to lay it all on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America at this “fateful juncture” in history.

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