Say what you will about Al Gore, but he made a good movie and he doesn’t deserve this:

Last night, Al Gore got very favorable national press and worldwide television exposure.

This afternoon, a group calling itself “The Tennessee Center For Policy Research” sent out a press release denouncing Vice President Gore for the size of his household electrical bills.

Apparently the attempt at a smear has spread throughout much of the internet already–heck, it’s been nearly 24 hours since the awards show. The question is, will they get away with it this time? I have long been of the opinion that Al Gore was too freakin’ polite for much of the 2000 campaign, but I am conflicted about the best way to deal with it long-term. Maybe progressives need a shadowy corps of smear artists to go head to head with Fox News and its ilk. There are two principal problems with that idea, though: (1) most progressives have too much integrity/self respect/human decency to routinely engage in the lying/twisting/manipulating of basic common sense and reality so common in their opponents, and (2) progressives may be too darned independent-minded to take the kind of marching orders that would be necessary for this sort of plan. This is not the kind of problem that will go away if you ignore it (it would if everyone ignored them, but that ain’t gonna happen.)

So I am calling on all intelligent independent-minded people to resist all these b.s. attempts to deflect attention away from what people like Al Gore say and towards misleading innuendoes about who they are. See, there probably aren’t very many actual counter-arguments, so the goal is to distract attention from that fact. I’m still trying to get my head around the arguments of those who doubt global warming–highlights seem to include that liberals hate America and that science can be determined democratically if enough people simply refuse to believe something (I choose to reject Avogadro’s number. I’ll get back to you on how that works out.)

Don’t just ignore this, though. It may not be worth dignifying with a response, but silence is really no longer golden.

Sigh.