After all these years Al Gore still manages to amaze me. He has, perhaps, good reason to be bitter about the 2000 election; but he did manage occupy the office of Vice President for eight years, and has been a national figure since that time. Yet his self-esteem remains so vulnerable that he still can't resist padding his resume with petty and easily exposeable lies. That is at least the way it seems from this Real Clear Politics piece by Jonah Goldberg:
In a recent write-up of Gore's visit to the Cannes Film Festival to promote his new film on global warming, which premiered Wednesday in Los Angeles, [Arianna] Huffington hailed the "new Gore" as the "hottest star in town," beating out Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks.
Gore told Huffington that this was his second trip to Cannes. "The first was when I was 15 years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists - Sartre, Camus. ... We were not allowed to speak anything but French!" This, gushed Huffington, "may explain his pitch-perfect French accent." Perhaps. Though according to David Maraniss' biography of Gore, the former vice president's 15th summer was spent working on the family farm. Remember those stories about how Al Sr. said, "A boy could never be president if he couldn't plow with that damned hillside plow"? That was the same summer.
Apparently, Poppa Gore thought a boy who couldn't both plow a field and parlez French existentialism could never be president either. Then there's the fact that young Al got C's in French at his tony Washington high school, St. Alban's. That's some school if a kid who can intelligently discuss Sartre's "La Nausée" and Camus' "Betwixt and Between" in apparently pitch-perfect French still can't earn a B in French class. Mon dieu!
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