Gore's Not the Only One Who Won

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Mary Lyon

Pardon my cackling. I'm savoring my win.

The man from whom the highest American honor imaginable was stolen at the end of 2000 has now been awarded the highest honor the world community has to offer. And. I. Am. Loving. It.

Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize is richly-deserved. By all rights he should be accepting it in Oslo at the end of this year as a magnificent bookend near the conclusion of his second term as the forty-third President of the United States, at the opposite end of his triumph over George W. Bush seven years ago. Perhaps he wouldn't have had the time to develop public awareness about the crisis of global warming if he'd had the kind of load on his shoulders that any competent president has to carry. Or maybe, with the clout, luster, and bully-pulpit of the White House at his command, he could have put that much more “oomph” into this cause. We would at least have been much farther along toward solving this crisis after almost seven years. Who can say? Nevertheless, this latest and most magnificent accolade is all the sweeter because it's OUR win, as well.

Invariably during the coverage of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement, print and broadcast reporters, anchors, and pundits described it as a vindication of the stolen election that allowed Bush to slither into Gore's rightful seat behind the Resolute Desk. It's long past time the media widely acknowledged that particular “inconvenient truth.” Broad-based public verification of it SHOULD be commonplace by now. Yes, you can indeed say Gore has been vindicated. So have those of us in the majority of voters who marked our ballots for him originally. We were correct all along about him. We knew back then that he was by far the better man. That he's been named the newest Nobel Laureate now signals that everybody else across the globe knows it, too.

"One can generate a lot of heartburn thinking about all of the things that would be better about this country and the world if the Supreme Court had done the right thing and ruled for Al Gore instead of George W. Bush in 2000." New York Times editorial from Saturday.

Heartburn indeed. I wake up with it every morning, thinking about what might have been if we had a Gore presidency instead of the nightmare under which we've shuddered for most of this decade. Paul Krugman correctly points out that the wrong-wing has knee-jerk apoplexy over Al Gore - mainly because, unlike him, they and theirs have been wrong about everything that counts.