I'll leave the Jonah stuff alone after this post, but his response to me is a bit bizarre. We've now whittled down Gore's offense to having misrepresented his time in France as a period spent studying the existentialists rather than working to improve poor language grades. Note, by the way, that we're no longer wondering whether he went, which was the original allegation. But alright -- let's go to the tape. Here's the quote:
'This is my second visit to Cannes. The first was when I was fifteen years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists — Sartre, Camus... We were not allowed to speak anything but French!'
First, lets note that the quote is truncated -- check the ellipses. I'll e-mail Arianna to see what the full graf looks like. Nevertheless, what can we actually learn here? Gore went to a language immersion program in France where he studied the existentialists. He characterizes it as coming to study the existentialists, his father's aim was to improve Gore's grades.
As I said before, when I was 17, I went to UCLA for the summer to take some philosophy courses. Well, at least that's why I went. Ask my father why I went and he'll tell you that I was inches away from failing out of school, and he was hoping time in a university environment would help me improve. So I went to UCLA to improve my grades in high school, but in my mind, I went there to take some intro courses in philosophy. Am I a liar? By Jonah's criteria, yes. And that's the problem.
