Why Gore Derangement Syndrome is so sad to watch

I saw the first few minutes of Fox News Sunday yesterday, and was struck by how angry the conservative Republicans were about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. These guys don’t just ignore the scientific evidence, they lash out wildly at Gore, the Nobel committee, the scientists, everyone who dares to think differently than they do.

Bill Kristol disparaged Gore and the Nobel prize itself, saying “it’s a prize given by bloviators to a bloviator.” Charles Krauthammer insisted the award goes to “people whose politics are either anti-American or anti-Bush, and that’s why [Gore] won it.”

These pundits were obviously bitter and incensed, much the same way National Review’s Iain Murray was late last week, when he suggested Gore share his award with Osama bin Laden, “who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance” in a September video harangue. (Apparently, to accept global warming is to embrace a terrorist philosophy.)

It’s led Paul Krugman to ask a good question: “What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?”

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration. And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme. The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But that’s only part of it. Those on the right aren’t just angry because they’re wrong; they’re angry because their smear didn’t work.



[I]f science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros. Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

The headline on Krugman’s piece is entirely appropriate: “Gore Derangement Syndrome.” The whole “derangement syndrome” phenomenon stems from an increasingly common problem — when contempt for a leader strays from simple political opposition to irrational, reflexive antagonism. If so-and-so says “day,” I’ll say “night,” even if the sun is shining. It’s more important to fight the perceived opponent than to make sense.

And for far too long, that’s exactly how the right has approached Gore and the science on global warming. The evidence must be wrong, because Gore believes it. The Nobel Peace Prize must be worthless, because Gore won it.

These aren’t arguments. They’re sad and nonsensical temper-tantrums.