pantsfarm

So Drudge Report writes about some press release the Tennessee Center for Policy Research put out saying that Al Gore’s house uses a lot of power.

I hear about it a little later because it gets mentioned in a couple blogs I read. I go poking around Google Blog Search and find that it seems to have gotten a whole lot of crap written about it.

When I read the Press Release it struck me as a pretty silly ad hominem and not really deserving of much further thought. I figured, “he’s got a big house and it uses lots of power. Big whoop.”

However, this so-called controversy apparently stirred up enough attention to cause Gore’s office to respond through Think Progress. The response, to me, seems a little weak, but I honestly didn’t realize it was necessary in the first place. I guess that’s the kind of thing you have to do when you are so much in the public’s eye. A fickle and superficial public at that.

I guess I’m a little confused. The venom that pours forth from other bloggers and then the comments on them completely boggles me. With people crying “hypocrite!” left and right, it seems that perhaps the whole thing worked and the message of “stop fucking up the atmosphere so much” has been diminished because we’d much rather latch on to one single rich guy living his life in a way we can criticize. Forget the message, the messenger is much easier to attack.

I can only hope this isn’t indicative of the way most of America thinks and behaves.