Let's do the Time Warp again

First there was the unnecessary and unenlightening piece on Bill and Hillary's marriage in the NY Times this week. Now, as Gore promotes his global warming film An Inconvenient Truth and finds himself under attack from right-wing shills and oil industry-funded hacks, the press is taking another collective trip down memory lane.

I think I'd be hard-pressed to find someone, Democrat or Republican, who would claim that Gore was treated with complete fairness by the press during his presidential run. But I don't need to go over every ridiculous episode, from the bogus Internet invention story to the countless sarcastic comments on his woodenness-- the press is already rehashing it for us, and it's as dishonest as ever.

. . . one Gore put-down in particular this week caught my eye. The passage appeared in a Slate article about the "New" Al Gore, and amidst a laundry list of CW-sanctioned jabs regarding Gore's past failures, Slate's John Dickerson reminisced about how Gore "struggled to beat a weak Bill Bradley in the 2000 Democratic primaries." Really? (. . .)

In the end, Gore won every primary contest against Bradley in 2000, and did it by an average of +47. Gore threw a shut-out in what was one of the most lopsided routs in recent primary history as Bradley, despite spending $40 million, was only competitive in a handful of New England states.

Six years later, and we're still being handed this rubbish. Heaven help Gore if he decides to run in 2008. As it is, he isn't even a candidate and the press is making up negative stories.

UPDATE: Joe Conason's new piece for the New York Observer takes a look at the long history of abuse directed at Gore for his pro-environment stance. "Bizarre." "Nutty." "Crazy." It's all there in full 1990s glory.