Algore, Jr. recently sold his failing lefty television network to the oil (and blood) drenched Islamofascists, through their media arm, Al Jazeera. They paid $500 million for it, one-fifth of which went to the Chief Tree Hugger. That’s right: Ol’ you-need-to-recycle-your-toilet-paper Al took nine figures of hydrocarbon dollars. Had to close the deal before the end of the year of course, in order not to get popped by the increase in capital gains taxes. (Oh dear, had he not read the memo from his fellow vice president, Orator Biden? It’s patriotic to pay your taxes in the greatest amount possible.)
This article from the National Review asks why Al Jazeera would pay that kind of money for a bust brand. Given the tiny viewership and lackluster performance, why would anyone pay that kind of money? The author asks us to cast our minds back to Al Gore, Sr., also erstwhile senator from Tennessee.
While in office, Al, Sr. took a bribe gift of a herd of cattle from a Soviet spy-master named Armand Hammer. Being of an entrepreneurial bent, Al, Sr. sold the herd. Time after time after time after time, to lobbyists who never seemed to manage to remember to get down to Tennessee to pick up their new livestock. Al, Sr. was a key player, it seems, in finagling the Libyan concession for Hammer’s Occidental Oil. Was it just a coincidence that, with its oil wealth flowing into the corporate hands of a Soviet spy-master, Libya ended up a Soviet client state? Surely a coincidence and nothing more. Al, Sr. also proved his worth to Hammer in keeping J. Edgar Hoover off his neck. After losing his senate seat, Al, Sr. ended up as CEO of Hammer’s American coal operations . . . at $500,000 per year, in the 1970s. Al, Sr. had given good service, and bless ol’ Armand’s heart, we was willing to pay for it. And did.
Zubrin asks what has Li’l Al done for the oil sheiks. Al, after all, has been the biggest bore big toe in the environmental movement, tirelessly campaigning against the evils of carbon-based energy sources. But as Zubrin is impolite enough to point out, what the enviro-nazis have succeeded in doing is only crippling the exploitation of oil in the Western non-OPEC world, and in Al’s case, the United States in particular. The embedded chart at the link shows that world growth in oil production since the early 1970s has been nearly exclusively from non-OPEC, non-U.S. producers. OPEC of course shifted its long-term strategy in those years from production to constriction of supply, for the express (and successful) purpose of keeping prices as high as possible. Constriction of a fungible commodity works only if you keep competition off the market. Enter the Western tree huggers. They’ve been extremely successful at keeping oil from stable, democratic countries off the market. That may be changing now. With the tar sands of Canada and horizontal drilling in the U.S., combined with massive new proven reserves of natural gas, the hegemony of the Islamofascists may be entering its final period. If you don’t think the Islamofascsts recognize the threat to their revenue stream, witness the Saudi effort to subsidize the “green” movement in Canada and its attacks on Canada’s new-found oil wealth.
Zubrin does some rough calculation on what has been the total cost to the West of OPEC’s artificially-maintained oil price structure. As one might expect, it runs in billions. If you went back and ran the numbers forward, from 1973 to the present, and converted everything to present dollars, I’d be surprised if it weren’t well into the trillions of dollars. In addition to lifestyles for the elite of the Islamofascist world that are beyond the comprehension of the ordinary mortal human, all that extra money has sustained decades of consistent efforts to destroy Western civilization, both culturally, politically, and militarily. The West, with its traditions of small “l” liberalism, personal opportunity, equality before the law, openness to change from within, and secular government, has paid for the privilege of being attacked politically, culturally, and physically by a group of people whose hatred for every last one of those Western traditions is boundless. We see how monstrous was the Nazis’ fining the Jews for the costs of cleaning up after Kristallnacht, how they added insult to injury and crowed about it. The enviro-nazis see nothing objectionable in the same process playing out over decades. [By the way, do these quasi-pagan tree huggers think for a moment they and their animism would be tolerated in a world run by the Islamofascists?]
Thus Al, Jr. has, whether such was his intention at the outset or not, given good service to those who aim for the destruction of American society. Li’l Al once contemplated the ministry; actually took some courses in theology. Does he not understand that the “Arab Street” means precisely what they say when they label the U.S. as the great Satan? Is he truly ignorant of how they propose to, and actually do, attend to Satan’s adherents when found in their midst? Has he ever seen a video of some wretched woman being stoned to death for a moment’s weakness with a man she loved?
I would ask whether Al’s conversion to eco-fascism has convinced him of the necessity of bringing down America. Except I don’t think any such “conversion” ever occurred. Famously, just one of Al’s houses — the place in Nashville, not the nine-bathroom mansion in California — uses more electricity in one month than the typical family of four uses in an entire year. He flies all over hell and half of Georgia in his carbon-spewing private jets. Al, in other words, believes in the “fierce moral urgency” of minimizing his carbon footprint to exactly the same extent the Medici popes believed in forsaking the world’s sinful wealth.
We can take goofy but sincerely held faith off the table in accounting for Al’s actions, in short. That leaves us with (i) simple greed, or (ii) something more sinister, namely an earnest desire to harm Western civilization in general and the U.S. in particular. Of the two, I plump for the former, if only because the latter is so monstrous that I decline to accept it as a motive for the actions of a previous senator and vice president of the U.S. unless consistency of action leaves no other credible explanation. We have the example of his daddy, who was thoroughly corrupt and utterly indifferent about whether his corruption furthered or hindered the goals of our enemies. And Junior’s service to OPEC isn’t the only example we have of his willingness to sell out America for cash. Has anyone forgot ol’ “no controlling legal precedent” Al and his fundraisers with the monks . . . where the cash was coming from, and known to be coming from, front organizations for the Red Chinese military? Has anyone forgot the Clinton administration’s transfer of missile guidance and other technology to Red China, over the express objections of the Pentagon and the Dept. of Commerce?
The problem with greed is that when unbridled it corrodes all other sensibilities. Ditto lust. Algore’s boss Clinton was willing to drag the presidency through the slime, to jeopardize the stability of American government, just to get his knob polished by some intern. In the quest for campaign cash, Clinton and Gore were both willing to give Red China, a country which makes no pretense of its intentions about America’s and its own relative places in the world’s pecking order, decades’ worth of technological progress in areas extremely relevant to altering those relative places.
The only weakness in my preference for greed over conviction in explaining Gore’s actions is that depending on how you read it, it has trouble explaining the ex post payoff. Al’s been doing this for years, after all, and while he’s certainly been selling indulgences with all the zeal of an anti-Pope, I’m not aware of any direct, continuing relationship with the Islamofascists. The OPECkers can’t imagine that his enviro-nazi street cred will have been enhanced by this last deal, so you can’t paint the payoff from the buyer’s perspective as being in respect of future affirmative services to be performed. Are they buying his silence? What if Algore were to come out and admit that the “science” behind his movies, his campaigns, his presentations, is all gun-decked? Maybe that’s the payoff, then: Not payment for previous services rendered, as in his father’s chairmanship of his client’s/patron’s coal company, but for future silence about the charlatanism of the enviro-nazi movement and where the money for it is coming from.
I like that explanation best of all. Back in the Dark Ages, when one petty potentate liquidated another’s holdings, in lieu of just slitting his throat outright, the standard prophylaxis was to tonsure him and put him in a monastery. The new monk was like as not glad to escape with his life, and the new master was spared the necessity of worry over a resurgent claimant. We don’t have monasteries any more, but tainted money can serve just as well. The Islamofascists pay Al and his cronies a half-billion (and by the way, the folks who got the other $400 million do not profit from any of my assumptions relative to Al and his motivations; I’m fully willing to believe the worst of them in regard to their feelings about the U.S.) and buy his silence about the enviro-nazi movement. What’s to prevent Algore from reneging on his bargain, though? That’s easy: He’s still got money to be made, peddling indulgences. The curious thing about the sale of indulgences was that no matter how transparently fraudulent the sale was, and how obviously iniquitous the seller, to the true believer it made no difference. And whatever Al’s true thoughts may be, no one can doubt the genuine fervor of his dupes. They may be outraged over the towering cynicism of his betrayal, but they’ll keep on paying. Just like they always do.
And the Islamofascists? They’ve already bought the Canadian “green” movement. Now they’ve at secured a right of first refusal on the American franchise.