By Don Irvine ——Bio and Archives--August 29, 2011
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Gore: I remember, again going back to my early years in the South when the Civil Rights Revolution was unfolding. There—there were two things that really made an impression on me. My generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on the Civil Rights demonstrators and we went, “Whoa! How gross and evil is that?” and my generation asked older people, “Explain to me again why it’s okay to discriminate against people because their skin color is different?” And when they couldn’t really answer that question with integrity, the change really started.
Secondly, back to this phrase “win the conversation,” there came a time when friends or people you worked with or people you were in clubs with—you’re much younger than me so you didn’t really go through this personally, but—there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they would just—you know—it would just—(waves away with hand)—natural—there came a time when people said, “Hey man, why do you talk that way? I mean, that—that’s wrong. I don’t go—I don’t go for that, so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.” That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won, and we still have racism—God knows—but it’s so different now and so much better. And we have to win the conversation on climate. In some quarters, it has become almost politically incorrect to use the word.So now that the “science” behind global warming, or climate change as it is now more commonly referred to, has more holes in it than Swiss cheese, Gore is now turning to playing the race card in an attempt to discredit global warming skeptics. This effort to play the race card is likely to backfire on Gore, as Civil Rights activists tire of seeing their cause being hijacked and distorted to suit the political whims of global warming proponents. It has been tried with the Tea Party and failed and will fail again with Gore’s latest effort. Even the mainstream media, who would love nothing better than to attack global warming skeptics, hasn’t bit on Gore’s comparison and probably won’t since it’s so ridiculous. Even the unabashed liberal Keith Olbermann, who works for Gore’s Current TV, hasn’t picked up on this yet which should tell Al he is grasping at straws. As they say in Twitterland #AlGoreFail.
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Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media and its sister organization Accuracy in Academia. As the son of Reed Irvine, who launched AIM in 1969, he developed an understanding of media bias at an early age, and has been actively involved with AIM for over 30 years.