Where did the evening go? It’s quarter to ten, and this is the first opportunity I’ve had to write anything. There will be no rhyme, reason, or coherent structure to this.
I had my interview for the Groton Charter Revision Commission tonight. I expected a grilling, but in fact the council had no questions. I think that means I’m on, so I will once again have the chance to tinker with the fundamental law of the Town of Groton. May the laws of chance that control all see that we do no harm.
Must reading today on various outposts on the internets about the continuing media assault on Al Gore. Having successfully demolished reason, Al is almost all that’s left to them:
How hard is it to figure out if a book has footnotes? When it comes to Al Gore’s new, national bestseller, The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press, May 2007), it’s trickier than you think for some disdainful members of the Beltway press corps.
On June 10, The Washington Post published an opinion column by Andrew Ferguson about Gore’s new book. Personally, I give The Assault on Reason high marks as a spot-on, truth-telling critique of the Bush administration, as well as for the insightful concern Gore expresses about the fragile state of American democracy. Or, “what passes for a national conversation,” as Gore puts it.
Not surprisingly though, Ferguson, an editor at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, disliked the book, waving it off as “a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation.”
What was embarrassing for both Ferguson and the Post was that in the very first sentence of his column, Ferguson made a whopping error when he condescendingly observed that The Assault on Reason had no footnotes. (The book is such a mess, footnotes would have been of no use, he suggested.) The problem, according to Ferguson, is that without footnotes readers have no way of checking the sources for the many historical quotes Gore uses in the book, including one on Page 88 from Abraham Lincoln that Ferguson would “love to know where [Gore] found.”
In fact, if Ferguson had simply bothered to look, every one of the nearly 300 quotes found in The Assault on Reason is accompanied by an endnote with complete sourcing information, including the quote on Page 88 that Ferguson focuses on. The endnotes consume 20 pages of the book.
Well, Ferguson was telling the literal truth-the book has no footnotes. It’s mindless stuff like this that prevented us from getting Gore in 2000, since the media preferred the mindless Bush to the thinking Gore. They continue to savage Gore mainly because they are covering up their own complicity in foisting Bush on the nation.
I must share this picture of a friend of ours from the newly Blue state of New Hampshire:
His wife, who is a high school friend of my wife’s, send it around to her email list, resulting in several replies asking where one can get such a wonderful shirt. Mine should be coming soon. You can order your’s here.
I realize this is disjointed, but with only a few minutes to write I don’t really have time to think. I have to go pack for another trip to Maine, this time for a little vacation to visit my sister. I’m assuming I’ll have no internet access at her cottage, but I’m hoping to go to Sister Mary Catherine’s internet cafe to keep in touch and inflict my ravings on an innocent world. I just hope the good Sister doesn’t rap knuckles if she disapproves of one’s browsing preferences.
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