Posted on 03/31/2008 1:47:19 PM PDT by Delacon
A few things came to mind about the new Al Gore ad campaign, and his appearance with wife Tipper on CBS’s 60 Minutes last night. The first was the confused nature of the claimed target of this largest ad campaign ever, at least according to the Washington Post. Gore has repeatedly insisted (and 60 Minutes reiterated the claim) that the public are overwhelmingly with him, and that it is therefore the too-timid lawmakers who must be influenced; but the ad spokesman says it is aimed at influencing the public.
They are indeed walking a fine line here, because for their own reasons they need to say the public is with them: they can’t risk the appearance that Gore seems to bring along with him on this and related issues of being out on the fringe, and also have admitted that people are swayed when they think others have been swayed already. After all, why does someone need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to remind people how much they agree with them?
Second is that the $100 million ad campaign has gone to $100 million per year for three years, half of which — $150,000,000 — the New York Times says has been raised.
Remember, from where one receives funding dictates one’s opinions and legitimacy. The alarmists, and specifically Gore, tell us so.
So I particularly noticed when Tipper rushed to interject that the Gores had also tossed in, on top of the litany of pots of money which Gore claims he dedicated to this project, the $750,000 “cash component” of the Nobel Peace Prize which she said they also matched from their personal, recently swelled fortune. Add it up, and the Gore’s still come in around $100 million short of what they’ve raised.
So, where is it coming from? Tipper clearly didn’t want that question to fester, and Lesley Stahl either wasn’t interested, got the hint, or left it on CBS’s cutting room floor.
It’s worth noting that waaaaaaay down on the campaign’s FAQs page we are told that the funding came from Gore himself, via book and film profits plus Nobel prize, and his own contributions . . . “and has since received additional support in the form of private donations from those concerned about solving the climate crisis.” You’ll notice that this wording allows for corporations, hedge funds, and the like to be captured under its ambit.
It is clear that they actually desire the message to be that this is Al Gore’s project, funded as well as run by him, which is of course a little inconsistent with the warmists’ complaints that we’re focusing on him in our own efforts to focus on Gore’s hypocrisies. Why do we focus on Gore? Because as my colleague and fellow PG’er Iain Murray notes, “he is, unquestionably, the main financial as well as ‘moral’ driving force behind this crusade.” Dare we say, he’s their Big Oil.
Or, is he? They don’t want to talk about who is funding it. It might be their “partner” the Climate Action Network (certainly not the Girl Scouts, also a partner), which happens to be a bunch of businesses pulling an Enron and designing ways to make money off of carbon regulation. But the fact they don’t want you to know where the $100 mil-plus is coming from is a pretty good sign that we should ask. 60 Minutes clearly won’t.
ping
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Actually, they came up 148.5 million short. Albert Gore, Jr. is an irresponsible p*cker who has the potential to do great harm to the USA and other countries before he's finally put out to pasture.
It is an awfully large amount of money for something that doesn’t really mean anything. I could see someone raising $300 million for a Presidential campaign after you won the party nomination but the big money people do not put up funds like this for something that has not payback to them.
Either BS or it is idiots like Soros who just want to destroy everything while making money off doing it.
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