You've got to admire Jonah Goldberg's unwavering, unblinking commitment to his principles. I only wish his determination served a higher purpose than "Al Gore is a jackass":
These folks never want to engage whether Gore was in fact telling the truth or exaggerating. Do they think Gore ever really spent a whole summer as a teenager speaking fluent French about Sartre et al only to come home and get C's in French? If it's not true, isn't it really weird that he would say it? And, truth be told, if it is true, don't you think it's really weird that this is what a fifteen year-old kid wanted to do with his summer? (italics his)
If Gore didn't spend the summer in France studying existentialism, he's a liar. If he did, he's weird. Heads Jonah wins, tails Gore loses.
Jonah, it should be said, has no evidence that Gore didn't go to France for a summer, though that doesn't stop him from implying it in a nationally syndicated newspaper column (somebody call a blogger's ethics panel!). My guess is the young Al spent a number of weeks in France and, at 59, that's what dominates his memories from the Summer of 1962. So here's what we've got: Al Gore possibly misremembers particular dates from youth, George W. Bush refuses to publicly recall entire swaths of his ("When I was young and reckless..."). It's interesting to note which the press appears to prefer.
Relatedly, when I was 17, I spent a Summer at UCLA. Well, actually, it was six weeks, I just call it a summer. I am, it would seem, a liar. Worse, because I wanted to spend a high school summer taking college courses in philosophy, I'm weird. No wonder I like Al Gore. What is a wonder is that Jonah, who is constantly admonishing liberals to spend more time immersed in philosophy, doesn't. I guess some things are more important than consistency.
Update: Jonah's "evidence" for Gore's deception was that he couldn't find mention of this Summer in any of his bios of Gore. Well, as eagle-eyed reader Mike points out, he should have used Amazon's "Search Within This Book" feature (or at least thrown up one of his customary blegs). Debra Saunders' demolition project The World According to Gore (excitedly blurbed by The Weekly Standard) says:
While his father served in Congress, Gore spent most of the year living with his parents in an eight-flooor apartment on Embassy Row's elegant Fairfax Hotel. He was "finished" by extensive foreign travel. To help their boy learn Spanish, his parents sent him to Mexico one summer. They also shipped him to France and Switzerland to improve his C average in French.
As for Jonah's "And, truth be told, if it is true, don't you think it's really weird that this is what a fifteen year-old kid wanted to do with his summer?" It would seem his father sent him over there for some remedial education -- Dad's choice, not the fulfillment of young Gore's long-standing desire to study Sartre.
Just to explain why this irritates me so much, and thus why I've spent time debunking it, all that happened here was that Jonah heard Gore mention that he spent a summer studying existentialism in France, decided not to believe it, and wrote a newspaper column based on his hunch. That's it. It wasn't true, as you can see from Saunders' book, but hundreds of thousands of Angelenos -- my family included -- read it over their morning coffee nevertheless. And I doubt they're going to see a correction anytime soon. It's irresponsible journalism, and Jonah should know, and do, better.
It's missed potential, too -- I get some shit for this from you guys, but I think Jonah's a good writer, and, when he's not hacking it up, an interesting and fresh intellect. I would've loved to see a column based on this post of his. But rather than challenge his readers, he sought to do nothing but reactivate their old biases, and do so over something as small as which summer Gore spent in France. By his own admission ("there he goes again"), and for that matter, actions, he wasn't interested in the facts on the ground, just their superficially easy fit with larger narratives about Gore's untrustworthiness. It's disappointing. The LA Times -- and its unsuspecting readers, like my grandparents -- deserve better.
