Lew, back in 2005, Al Gore gave a wonderful speech, virtually every line of which we libertarians would find agreeable. He condemned the war, the surveillance state, and the Bushian policy of torture and indefinite detention. I lamented on LRC that the stirring speech had

resonated poorly among liberal circles. It should be the left’s treatise, its battle cry, against Bush’s reign. Unfortunately, most liberals still seem to prefer the Al Gore of 2000, who promised ever more government spending and had just played second fiddle to Clinton is his war on the Bill of Rights, which, however cooler and quieter than Bush’s turned out to be, was damaging and terrifying and tolerated by most liberals in the 1990s.

But there was one paragraph in that speech that betrayed his totalitarianism, power hunger, and arrogance:

[S]cientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training, whatsoever. Today, one of the leading scientific experts in the world on global warming in NASA, has been ordered not to talk to members of the press, ordered to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive branch can monitor and control what he shares of his knowledge of global warming. This is a planetary crisis — we owe ourselves a truthful and reasoned discussion.

And this is of course Gore’s real issue: Not civil liberties, not torture, not mass murder (remember he cheered on Bush I in his killing spree of Iraqis). The one issue of global warming fascism overshadows all, especially since Gore could probably not become a billionaire through advancing peace and due process. Another reminder that we can never trust a statist politician to even be relatively decent, no matter how good he might sound compared to whoever is in power at the time.