Gore Derangement Syndrome?

Paul Krugman has named it: His NYT column today accuses the right of having Gore Derangement Syndrome, as if Al Gore is a complete innocent and the right is completely whacko.

Before we go any further into whether Krugman's got a point worth putting a hat on, I offer this into evidence:

We conservatives did not make this ranting Al Gore up. After his (Constitutional) loss to Bush (a loss Krugman dismisses as "his opponent somehow ended up in the White House," as if the Constitution did not exist), Gore did get very bizarre and angry for a while, saying things most undiplomatic, earning our dislike of him.

Krugman thinks we dismiss Gore because of some sort of embarrassment over Bush being elected:

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.

Of course, there is no stain. Even the NYT agrees that Gore could not have won Florida, and without Florida, hanging chads and all, there could not be a Gore presidency. Krugman is just playing the old political card of attempting to hang his side's greatest weakness on the other side. We know that anger over the 2000 election propelled Bush Derangement Syndrome into the stratosphere, and Krugman must minimize that insanity before he can move forward his thesis that the right is insane. Otherwise, he's just the pot calling the kettle black.

The year 2000 is very far behind for most everyone except Krugman and his fringy leftist buddies. We can find things that make us angry about Gore that are much more contemporary, and much more valid. Krugman can't because he, like Gore, is a Warmie fanatic who is unfettered by truths:

It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

Like Gore, he doesn't believe in free markets, which have proved their efficiency time and time again. And like Gore, he believes Florida can be underwater in 50 or 60 years, while the scientific consensus -- words I don't throw around as lightly as they do -- calls for an unnoticeable one foot rise in ocean levels over the next 100 years.

Since Krugman is a faithful Gore acolyte, accepting his hysteria as truth, anyone who questions the High Priest must be by definition insane. But we are not insane; we are practical. All we ask is that the hysteria be expunged, the truth be told, and the truth be measured against other truths, so we can spend money wisely, choosing intelligently between the multiple challenges humanity faces.

That's no good for Krugman and his avid, vapid readers. (Look at the memeorandum links to see how blindly the leftyblogs aped his inanity.) They need hysteria; they need demons and Saint Gore provides them.

Without Gore, environmentalism would by dying the death of a successful movement that has written the regulations that put it out of business. Without Gore, big government would have no reason to exist, other than Hillarycare, whose future is a bit tenuous.

But with Gore, we have a reason to stay rabid on the environment instead of reasonable, we have a reason to impose big government on little people willy-nilly for at least the next century or two. And if we raise a peep of protest, then we must be suffering from Gore Derangement Syndrome; we certainly can't have a point worth making.

I was tempted to nominate Krugman's column as one of the year's most ridiculous, but it's too much "Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can't hear you!" and not enough attempted reason to merit the nomination.