What fascinates about Al Gore is not - as this article from the Chicago Sun-Times shows so clearly - that he is full of hooey when it comes to his global warming “scientific” pronouncements. It is that so many people believe him and that he is more popular than ever.

As so much has changed in our society, fuddy-duddy “liberalism” has become the most conventional or, dare I say it, conservative of belief systems. It’s almost as if the novels of Sinclair Lewis have been resurrected in our times with Al as Babbitt or Elmer Gantry - actually a bizarre contemporary combination of the two. We have a public, most of which does not have any serious or formal scientific training in climatology - listening to the opinions of someone who may have even less. Our media, of course, is equally bourgeois and conventional in its simplistic response to his Alness, simply accepting what even the most normal inquiring mind would delve into on a more sophisticated level. But you won’t find that in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Instead we got non-stop applause replete with endless Nobel Prize speculation.

Besides being ridiculous, this Babbittry is finally anti-environmental. Any reasonable person should be concerned about the environment. Any reasonable person should be concerned about conservation. But turning global warming - anthropogenic or otherwise - into a self-aggrandizing personal crusade replete with constant misrepresentation of fact is reactionary and ultimately dangerous. Our environment is a serious matter, not a cause upon which to resurrect a floundering career.

UPDATE: Didn’t realize Maggie’s Farm beat me to the punch way back in February.

I am sitting in the passenger seat of our Subaru SUV (sorry, no hybrid) typing this on my MacBook with a Verizon modem card beamed upward. We are on the dreaded Highway 5, headed all the way to Seattle and, ultimately, Bainbridge Island. It is now 10:12AM Pacific. We got on the road around 5:15AM to beat the traffic and ran smack into two accidents that slowed everything down for about an hour. Then we made the obligatory stop at Harris Ranch for breakfast (it’s not great but it’s all there is on this cuisine starved highway in such a foodie state).

What tickles me is that I can contact the Pajamas crew on iChat as I go, watching the Verizon bars bounce up and down at the top of my screen. So far reception has been pretty good. Speeds are so-so, not equal to broadband (as the company brags), but still it’s amazing to be able to do this. And, unlike an iPhone, I’m typing away right on normal keys with the computer jacked straight into the car, not wasting batteries.

An old friend of mine, film critic Joel Siegel, just passed away from cancer at 63. These days, that’s young. Years back Joel was part of a regular poker game at my house in Echo Park. I owe him big time for a review he wrote of my novel The Big Fix in the LATimes back in the Seventies. It helped jump start my career. Later on he would review movies I wrote on ABC, not always as kindly. By then we were living on opposite coasts and wouldn’t see each other as often. But when we did, it was always relaxed and amusing. Joel Siegel liked to laugh.

Excuse a father’s pride at his son’s rave review in today’s Los Angeles Times.

It isn’t difficult to imagine a cargo cult gathering around Simon’s sculpture, which seems to have washed ashore from a world more intriguing than this one.

If you’re in the Southern California area, hustle down to the Patricia Faure Gallery before the show closes July 14.

For the foreseeable future, those who covet such jobs at President of the United States and Prime Minister of Great Britain are entering prime be-careful-what-you-wish-for territory. Two days after installation, Gordon Brown was faced with a potential attack that PJM Barcelona editor Jose Guardia told me on IM when I woke this morning would have been “Madrid-level or worse”. And he should know. (Jose did his usual superb job of providing the important links to the event - while California slept).

I imagine most of us wish this stuff would just go away and we could return to what passed for our normal lives. I know I would. Unfortunately, it’s not. The most logical prediction is that it only is going to get worse. And it has been brewing for a long time - long before the Iraq War and 9/11 or even the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. If you’re looking for benchmarks, you’re more likely looking at the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. But even that is just one bump in a road going back centuries. Where will it stop?

I have been meaning to write for some time some thoughts I have about the documentary film form and have been inspired to do so because of an article on Pajamas - A Liberal College Kid Sees Sicko. We published that piece because we like to stimulate discussion and because, frankly, we want to bring younger people into Pajamas Media. (The CEO is, as many of you know, of a “certain age.”)

Now my intention in this post is not to bash Michael Moore - I’ve done plenty of that - but to examine the documentary form. To be blunt, I am suspicious of it, no matter what point of view is taken by the filmmaker. Film, to begin with, is highly manipulative, but documentaries purport to be truth. Are they? Not really. They are an arrangement of the version of the truth the filmmaker wishes to portray or promulgate. In fact, in most cases, they are a HiMarks outline of that version of the truth, because the film is at most two hours long. (Of course there are exceptions - The Sorrow and the Pity, etc.)

In the best documentaries (Crumb), this arrangement of the truth is brilliantly and subtly done. In other cases, flashy techniques are used to preach to the converted (Leni Riefenstahl… or, to a much lesser, cheesier effect, Michael Moore). But still it is an arrangement. It almost always lacks the intellectual rigor of text. If you look at Wikipedia, for example, even given the inherent biases, a basis for fact-checking is established. Documentaries, almost deliberately, obfuscate the facts. Fiction films, of course, are fictions. (Ironically, they may often be closer to the truth.)

Now of course all written forms - film and text - (including this) obfuscate facts. But the issue is the feedback and the checking. You can give me feedback - right now - in the comments and tell me where I am wrong. You can’t do that with a documentary. The name itself is fallacious.

The Fairness Doctrine is back in the air, most recently inspired by the ever-witty John “El Ponderoso“Kerry as well as Mesdames Clinton, Boxer and Feinstein. They all seem concerned by the preponderance of conservative voices on talk radio. A lot of this stems from the embarrassing failure of Air America. (Note to “liberals” - why would you expect Air America to succeed? There already was a liberal station on the air whose quality is and was about a thousand times better than Air America. It’s called NPR. Why would anyone waste a second listening to Air America?)

But leaving that aside, what exactly is “fairness” and to whom do we give this coveted “equal time?” Anarcho-syndicalists? Royalists? Members of Opus Dei? Jihadists? Scientologists? Retired Mugwumps? Or do we just give equal time to Sean Hannity and Al Gore? (who already have their voices drilled so deeply in our brains we’ll never get them out)

Sorry, John, Hillary, Barbara and Dianne, last I checked this is a democracy. A Fairness Doctrine means fairness for you. It’s no more than a scam. And it’s deeply reactionary.

… or it Hamas? I used to think Rosie O’Donnell was just a deadly boring loudmouth. Now… with this picture of her child…. I think should be put away. Any television network who puts the mother of a child posed like this on the air should have its collective head examined.

Richard Cohen has a rather conventional column in the WaPo this morning, which, in essence, states the obvious: the coming presidential election can sway either way because of the ever-present national defense issues. Both sides will use and abuse it after their fashion.

Okay.

But his article does include this howler: The GOP is adept at painting Democrats as soft on national security. It is equally adept at saying so in the most scurrilous way. And while most Americans would like the war to end, they do not favor a precipitous withdrawal and neither have they forgotten Sept. 11, 2001 — the entirety of Giuliani’s case for the presidency, after all.

Say what?

Rudy Giuliani is also greatly responsible for making New York - our biggest city of course - livable again after decades of high crime and disrepair. No other candidate in either party can cite a leadership accomplishment anywhere near that.

Your response, Richard?

John Podhoretz asks this question in the lead-off comments for Dr. Helen Smith’s new advice column on Pajamas.

(No, I don’t have an answer. I just do it… Yours is not to reason why… yours is just to do or… etc.)

BTW, new column by the Instawife looks to be fun. Jump in.