Al Gore lies — about me

AS YOU may have heard, Al Gore lies like a rug. The old punch line about how you know when a politician is lying is no joke when it comes to the vice president: If his lips are moving, you know.

The old punch line about how you know when a politician is lying is no joke when it comes to Al Gore: If his lips are moving, you know.

His lies are effortless and imaginative. He created the Internet. He and Tipper were the inspiration for "Love Story." He had no idea the Buddhist temple event was a fund-raiser. He co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. He "walked through the elephant grass and was fired upon" in Vietnam. He "always, always, always" supported Roe v. Wade. He "got a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail" when he was a reporter at the Nashville Tennesseean. His sister was "the very first volunteer for the Peace Corps." He "found" Love Canal. He authored the earned income tax credit. He contributed to Hubert Humphrey's acceptance speech at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. His father, the late Senator Albert Gore Sr., was a brave civil rights crusader.

Hogwash, all of it.

Now, in fairness, not all of Gore's fabrications are bare-faced lies. Sometimes they are merely shameless exaggerations.

He did, for example, hold hearings on the pollution at Love Canal — two months after the state and federal governments declared the town a disaster area. His TV ad boasting that he met with Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev wasn't completely false: He once shook Gorby's hand at a Capitol Hill luncheon. And when he bragged in February that he'd just come from "a huge event with 3,000 people" at Ohio State University, he was only off by a factor of 6. "Officials at that rally said the room . . . did not hold more than 1,200 people," The New York Times reported, "and, given the area needed for the staging . . . , they estimated the crowd at 500."

Gore tortures the truth, it seems, about everything. So it was only a matter of time until he tortured the truth about — me.

On April 26, the Gore campaign put out a press release titled "George W. Bush: A History of Personal Attacks and Negative Campaigning." It strung together excerpts from various articles, editorials, and columns, the cumulative effect of which was to suggest that Bush is waging the most destructive campaign seen in America since Sherman marched through Georgia. And right in the middle of that release were bits and pieces of a column your humble correspondent wrote on March 9.

Surely you remember. That was a column about Super Tuesday, and it said — well, let's just go to the Gore release, which quoted from two paragraphs in that column, including this one:

"Sure, the Texas governor deserved a smack for making his stand at Bob Jones University. . . . And sure, it was fair to whack McCain from the left, since he was wooing left-leaning voters — but to slam him as a foe of clean air? Or an enemy of women with breast cancer?"

My words, no doubt about it — but something is missing. The very next sentence, not quoted by the Gore campaign, said, "At their worst, these two behaved like disciples of Al Gore." How did Gore's people miss that? And how did they miss the paragraph, much higher up, that remarked: "If it isn't universally obvious by now just how dishonest and ruthless the vice president can be in the pursuit of power, it will be by November." For that matter, how did they miss my declaration that on Super Tuesday, "I voted against Al Gore"? It was the column's second sentence.

Mind you, it doesn't offend me to be quoted by the Gore campaign. It does surprise me, though. I have it on good authority that the vice president doesn't care for these little essays. I have it on very good authority: Gore told me so himself.

Last October, arriving at The Boston Globe for an editorial board interview, Gore walked around the room and shook hands with each of the editors and writers present. When he reached me, he started to shake my hand, too. But as soon as he heard my name, he withdrew his hand — then began peering intently at the top of my head. This was a new experience. Never having had my scalp scrutinized by a presidential candidate in front of two-dozen people before, I wasn't quite sure of the protocol.

"Where are the horns?" Gore asked.

The horns?

"From the columns you've been writing about me, I expected to see horns on your head."

Ah, such sparkling wit. Such a deft touch with the press! And to think that some people find Al Gore condescending and smug.

Don't get the wrong impression. I don't mean to suggest that everything Gore or his campaign staff says is false or contrived. Sometimes there is no question that they are speaking from the heart.

In March, for instance, Roger Simon of US News asked "a Gore adviser" to describe "the general tenor of the campaign" being planned against Bush. We're going to call Bush "a far-right-wing lunatic," Gore's man answered, and the campaign we run "is going to be brutal, incredibly negative, nasty, dirty, slimy, sleazy, and one of the worst in history."

Now that had the ring of truth.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.

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