Reporting on Al Gore Doesn't Win Friends on the Left

In Response to Michael Bouldin's Comments at MyDD.

Cross-posted at the Francis L. Holland Blog.

You asserted at MyDD that I had attempted to ingratiate myself with readers of DailyKos by writing a discussion of Karl Rove. You would have to have participated in our previous conversations there to understand that the whole essay to which you referred was really an elaborate criticism of Al Gore, a DailyKos favorite, without ever mentioning his name. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/17/92621/866

You see, in my research I learned, first of all, that Al Gore had never graduated from law school or divinity school, arguably because he admittedly spent at least some of the time getting high, smoking marijuana.

Al Gore has never explained at all why he failed to graduate from both divinity school and law school after two years of trying. (You can read my essays on this at DailyKos, and the citations within, and decide if you think I'm right or not.) I wrote quite a lot about this at DailyKos, which is the reason that "NeuvoLiberal" negatively rated so many of my diaries and comments. She was tired of my criticisms of Al Gore, whom she adores.

Anyway, as I was researching Karl Rove's life for a comparison of him and Hillary Clinton (something else that endeared me to no one), I realized that Karl Rove and Al Gore had something important in common: both of them had dropped out of degree programs without obtaining the degrees which they had sought.

In the article that you referred to as an attempt at ingratiating myself with DailyKos readers, many of whom adore Al Gore, I speculated that the Iraq Civil War was caused partly by Rove starting and perpetuating the Iraq War as a political issue to use domestically, which is not a controversial view at DailyKos. What WAS predictably controversial was my assertion that if Rove had stayed in college and graduated he might have been more prepared to grasp the complexities of the Iraq situation.

Anybody who had read my previous articles about Al Gore understood that this was a criticism of Al Gore, and also an assertion that Al Gore's failure to finish graduate school might have drastic and unforeseen consequences were he elected President of the United States. As such, the essay you referred was hardly an attempt at ingratiating myself; it was the final straw in infuriating the pro-Gore crowd at DailyKos. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/15/181824/78

They think it is irrelevant that Gore spent so much time inebriated during his undergraduate education and then through two unsuccessful years of law and divinity school, and he consequently never obtained a law degree, never passed the bar and never practiced law.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/15/181824/78

I, however, believe that in a meritocratic society where educational attainment is highly valued and often considered to be necessary, it HAS to be relevant that Barack Obama was the magna cum laude Editor of the Harvard Law Review while Gore did not graduate from law school at all. I simply couldn’t accept the argument that Gore was more qualified and so I insisted on reviewing his qualifications, even at the risk of angering his supporters. This is the argument and the subtext of the essay you read, and this was mentioned in the comments to that DailyKos essay. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/15/181824/78

I still think it is remarkable that most people don't know that Al Gore never completed law or divinity school, even after two years of trying, and even having all of the benefits of a patrician background, and even though his own mother graduated from the law school at which he failed. If a Black person or a woman had the same background, would all of us be willing to ignore it? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/15/181824/78

Or would we, more likely, conclude that it was a fatal flaw that bespoke of a weak character and or some sort of social dysfunction? Illegally smoking marijuana AND subsequently failing to graduate from TWO graduate programs at Vanderbilt University, even though he had all of the benefits of a patrician family, with a father who was a US Senator, and even though Al Gore’s mother graduated from the same Vanderbilt University law school from which he failed to graduate. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/15/181824/78

People at DailyKos were furious with me because I argued that Al Gore had been a beneficiary of a sort of affirmative action for wealthy white men, when he was elected to the US House of Representatives immediately after failing to graduate from law school. Are there any examples of women and minorities receiving the same benefits of what surely could have been substantial and reasonable doubt?

As for citations for the above explosive assertions, they are all provided in a meticulously researched essay I submitted at DailyKos, entitled, “Al Gore, What Happened in Graduate School?” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/15/181824/78

I explored the same topic in another diary entitled, “Crashing the White Male Supremacy Paradigm”, in which I argued that “Al Gore’s Career Success is a Triumph of the American White Male Supremacy Paradigm”. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/13/17134/488

It would certainly be outrageous to say these things about Al Gore if they were not true. I refer you and all readers to the essays cited herein, which include copious and meticulous citations that prove every explosive and inflammatory fact cited above. In fact, when readers at DailyKos could not disprove any of the facts included here, they said instead that they were irrelevant and should never have been reported in the first place. I disagree.

You will note that I have not accused Al Gore personally of a skin-color-aroused animosity or of being a "white supremacist" in the conventional sense. What I have asserted here and elsewhere is something Blacks and women know intuitively and powerfully: People who are not white and male have to do much more to get ahead, and cannot afford to fail as others do and still succeed.

I know some people will think this is "old news", or irrelevant. But how can we determine who is the "best person for the job" if we are unwilling to explore the academic failures of white men who are applicants? If Barack Obama had failed law school at Harvard, (instead of graduating magna cum laude), THAT would be considered interesting and relevant in everybody's book.

So, as you can see, the article you mentioned was anything but an attempt to ingratiate myself with the Gore supporters at DailyKos. Instead, it manifested my determination to explore, report and interpret the truth about a potential presidential candidate in the context of America, regardless of the consequences of doing so. Knowing that others at DailyKos were working to banish me from that blog, I refrained for a day from explicity criticizing Al Gore by name, but that can hardly be considered an attempt at ingratiating myself with readers there.

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