Left Circles The Wagons Around Al

Holy glowing lightbulbs, this is wierd.

Drudge runs an item from the Tennessee Center on Policy Research on the Gore's personal electrical use and not a soul denies the content of the release -- just the fact that it got reported at all. There's a lot of foam being flung from a lot of mouths on the rabid left this morning; I can imagine keyboards drenched in foam as blogscribe after blogscribe defends their demi-god Gore.

"Did you honestly think that the Right Wing $mear machine was going to let Al Gore stand up with the terrific team who created and direct the movie and receive an Oscar for 'An Inconvenient Truth?'" asks Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest. He continues:

Did you really believe they would stand by and watch a Democratic leader validated for his life's work?

No chance in hell.

Johnson is not one to ask questions of Gore; rather he attacks the source -- not a fact beyond low web hits on the group's Web site, but that doesn't stop him -- and when he's sufficiently riled up, he concludes:

But guess what? We're going to fight back. All of us.

Why? Well, first of all, Al Gore turning his lights on doesn't make him a hypocrite, it makes him a human.

Second, we've seen this game a few too many damn times. The trick is for them to create doubt and distraction. They need to create doubt all around the country about Al Gore. But there is no doubt.

Al Gore is a hero.

Even heroes need help - join us, add to the comments, let's find out everything we can about these guys and stop them in their tracks. Now.

Hey, we're all humans, after all. So do we all get a hall pass like Al does? Not a chance, not even if your name is Barack Obama:

Note to Senator Obama: spare us the hope and bi-partisanship talk and help us fight back.

Man, that's bleak.

The Anonymous Liberal bleats:

Moreover, Gore lives in a large home (10,000 sq. ft.). If you look at the data, it's clear that Gore's energy usage per square foot (even assuming the 221,000 kWh number is accurate) is well within the average range for his climate region.

His math is a bit screwy, but consider this: Lefties are quick to attack any overt sign of over-consumption -- a Hummer, for example -- but they're letting Al and Tipper, a household of two, get by with 10,000 sq. ft. of living space without a raised eyebrow?

Another meme is carbon footprint forgiveness, as enunciated here by Unqualified Offerings:

Curiously, the “free market” think tank that gives us our first link declares that Gore’s free choice to use his own money to offset his family’s carbon output makes him a “hypocrite,” since he thinks global warming is bad.

Several of the leftyposts have challenged the Tennessee Center's math -- not with facts, but with suppositions -- but none raise a question about the foundational mathematical assumptions of carbon neutrality.

Suppose Al buys trees to offset the carbon footprint of his private jet. If they're seedlings, they're not scrubbing the amount of carbon of mature trees, the trees that are used in neutrality calculations. If the money preserves mature forests, is he compensating for the tree-buying organization's management costs and over-contributing to take care of his true carbon footprint?

Good questions. Don't expect the Warmie Left to answer them.

Several blogs pointed to Dave Johnson's post as a great rebuttal to the statements about the Gores' energy use. He's got solar. He's got flourescents. His house is big, so it's average use isn't that big.

Look, if he's got solar and flourescents, it just makes matters worse. He's really, really got to be burning electrons 24/7 to be 20 times the natural average if he's greened up his house that much.

This is simple stuff, not rocket science. But it doesn't protect Al, so it's not going to be covered by his allies on the Left.

hat-tip: memeorandum