The Fourth Dixie Chick

Al Gore has been hopping around the globe promoting his global warming film, An Inconvenient Truth.

He's also been attacking his nemesis, George W. Bush.

At the Hay Festival in Wales, Gore seemed to be auditioning to be the fourth Dixie Chick.

He gave an interview to The Guardian that makes Natalie Maines seem like a Bush supporter.

The Dixie Chicks have been speaking out against Bush again to drum up sales for their latest album. TIME obliged by putting them on the cover last week.

Similar to the Chicks' style of promotion, Gore is slamming Bush while whoring for his new movie.

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists".

In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming.

Taking a cue from ABC producer John Green and his infamous anti-Bush rant:

"Al Gore makes me sick. If he uses the 'recovering politican' line one more time, I'm going to puke."
Everywhere he goes, he uses that same "recovering politician" laugh line, and the media repeat it constantly.

Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: "If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right."

I believe that Gore's politics haven't shifted to the left. I think he just feels freer to express himself.

He's always been a lunatic.

Mr Gore, who appeared at the Guardian Hay literary festival over the bank holiday weekend, is promoting An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary and book detailing the climate change crisis that he warns "could literally end civilisation".

Gore's "sky is falling" approach makes him appear to be a tad off balance, which is completely in balance with being a flaming lib.

The new levels of attention he is receiving have led some Democrats to call on him to run again for president, while others have responded with anger that Mr Gore did not show the same level of passion in the 2000 campaign.

He has since acknowledged that he followed too closely the advice of his consultants during that campaign, and - before he started to scoff at the idea of running again - swore that if he ever did so, he would speak his mind.

In my dreams, Gore would run and speak his mind. Nothing could be better for the conservative movement.

I do think it's weird that he admits that he was too spineless to follow his own beliefs when he ran for president. He acknowledges that he allowed his handlers to package him like a pop idol -- the Jessica Simpson of presidential politics.

Are Americans to believe that Gore has developed a backbone since 2000?

Once an invertebrate, always an invertebrate.

In the years since, he has been a steady critic of specific Bush administration policies. He opposed the war on Iraq at a time when most prominent Democrats were supporting it, and more recently spoke out against what he called "a gross and excessive power grab" by the administration over phone tapping.

Gore could oppose the war at the time because he wasn't trying to get elected like the pretend tough on terror Dems.

Moreover, his power grab comments are no different than a typical Russ Feingold "King George" tirade.

...In the US, Mr Gore's environmental campaign has sparked a backlash from some on the right who accuse him of scaremongering. A series of television advertisements, launched by a thinktank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argue that carbon dioxide emissions are a sign of American productivity and progress.

I don't accuse him of scaremongering. I accuse him of being a missionary of bad science.

...At the weekend, Time magazine reported that he was telling key fundraisers they should feel free to sign on with other potential candidates. The magazine quoted unnamed Democratic sources as saying that the former vice-president had also been asking the fundraisers to "tell everybody I'm not running".

...It is significant, however, that Mr Gore refuses to go beyond saying that he has no "plans" for such a campaign. "I haven't made a Shermanesque statement because it just seems odd to do so," he has said - a reference to the famous announcement by the civil war general William Sherman, who unequivocally refused to stand in the election of 1884. "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve," General Sherman said.

Oh.

When Gore said "Shermanesque," I thought he was referring to Sherman of Peabody's Improbable History fame.

Gore is wallowing in all the attention he's been getting like a pig wallows in newly formed mud from a melting glacier in Argentina.

I think he loves playing these games. Frank Rich of The New York Times is among Gore's liberal elite enablers, devoting his most recent Sunday column to the dream of a Gore candidacy.
I, for one, sincerely wish Gore would run in 2008.

Gore and Kerry.

Yeah, that's the ticket, with promises of cabinet positions for the Dixie Chicks.