At the very least...
This (Al Gore statement) comes across like the self-serving rhetoric of a middle or executive manager taking credit for the ideas, creativity, and hard work of his employees.
At the worst, it sounds as stupid as any tongue-tripping phrase George W. Bush ever uttered, but potentially worse because Al Gore doesn't have the benefit of being well known as a horrible public orator recognized for his ability to muddy simple phrases.
In either case, the reason it lives on (especially among people working in technology) is because it is a particularily galling example of a politician with no significant understanding of technology making broad statements that are as annoyingly off base as most scenes of computer use in Hollywood blockbusters. I'm not political either. I wish Orrin Hatch (R) - Utah, would stop voicing his opinions on technology matters too. I heard Rush talking about MP3s about a decade ago and how the dynamic range was so horrible that it would never be adopted as a replacement technology for traditional media, and wanted to crawl through the radio and beat him with a Creative Xen Jukebox.
Defending Al Gore on this issue is accepting his behavior on this issue, and his behavior was unacceptable. He misspoke, he spoke in ignorance, and he discredited himself in the act of doing this. It isn't as bad as scenes of him flying over the Amazon in a private jet spewing carbon into the atmosphere, a tear rolling down his eye like a Native American looking at a land-fill, with a PowerBook carefully positioned in the middle of the frame.
But it is close.
There are multiple examples of Al Gore behaving in this general manner. I bring them up whenever I get the chance because I hope that my critical thinking skills will rub off on people who read my posts, and they'll start calling politicians on the same behavior I observe. That is why *I'm* unwilling to let this one drop when I have the opportunity to address it. It is but one grievence I have about Al Gore and his political activities. We can also talk about how he sat as the President of the Board of Directors at Apple and pardoned Steve Jobs of any wrong doing in the SEC case of post-dated options. How many times do we have to illustrate that this guy is a protypical corrupt politician before people stop drinking his Kool Aide without ever questioning it?
If you can't see the hypocrisy and political contempt for the average voter in either of these examples, then it is hard for me to chalk that up to anything other than partisian, political bias. My opinions are absolutely political, but they're not partisan. I'm willing to call out any politician acting the fool. Most frequently, I find that this is Democrats - but Republicans certainly aren't immune.
