Here's Easterbrook:
Deciding to divorce, Al and Tipper Gore released -- via e-mail -- a statement calling the split a "mutually supportive decision that we have made together." Dear, I am supporting you by leaving you. Now Al can fulfill his furtive desire to listen to rap music with dirty lyrics, while Tipper has her revenge by leaving the engine running on her SUV. My advice to couples hoping for a long marriage: Don't make out on national television. These two did, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000, and look where it got them.
In retrospect, could that nationally televised kiss have been more evidence that everything about Al Gore is phony? When Sandra Bullock and Scarlett Johansson played tongue hockey at the MTV Movie Awards, their mega-smooch was obviously done for publicity; they didn't claim to be in love. Al, on the other hand, wanted us to believe his feelings for Tipper were genuine.
That's a lot of crap in two paragraphs, innit? First Easterbrook seems to believe that Al left Tipper, even though there's nothing to support that; maybe Easterbrook is unaware that couples really do make mutual decisions to divorce. But it's the second paragraph that is pretty amazingly creepy. Easterbrook is stating outright that since they're divorcing now, in 2010, then by Golly, Al could never have actually loved his wife. Especially not ten years ago.
Easterbrook's faulty assumptions here run a pretty impressive gamut, don't they? He thinks he's qualified to pass comment on the emotional lives of two people I can only assume he doesn't know very well, and he seems to be assuming that a marriage that ends in divorce can never have been a marriage based on love at all. Married people might love each other now but divorce in the future? To Easterbrook, this is unthinkable. Heck, don't tell him that some couples that divorce actually still love one another and divorce because of other emotional complexities; I don't think Easterbrook could wrap his head around that concept. Do Al and Tipper Gore still love each other, in spite of their separation? Have they loved each other all along and are now separated for complex reasons? Or have they never really loved each other at all? I have no idea, because I don't know either one of them. But Gregg Easterbrook has seen all he needs to see in order to divine the workings of Al Gore's emotional life.
What the heck is it about Al Gore that turns people into raving idiots? I've been wondering this for years.
Every NFL season, Easterbrook keeps an eye out for the worst play of the season thus far committed by an NFL team. This year, I'm doing the same thing -- but I'll be tracking the stupidest thing said by Gregg Easterbrook thus far this season. Can he get dumber than this? We'll see!
3 comments:
Easterbrook wasn't the only one who thought that that kiss was awkward and rehearsed. Why did the Gore campaign felt that it was necessary at all to publicly show Al as a "wife-f****r" (as Bill Maher had said) at all? Several shots of them being closer together than the average politician and wife would have seemed far more genuine.
I have no problem with thinking there was something "awkward" about that moment. I have a big problem with Easterbrook's notion that that moment somehow grants him some kind of big insight into Al Gore's emotional life or somehow give Easterbrook special powers of reading Gore's mind.
The motivation behind that kiss is pretty simple, in my mind: the big charge against Gore back then was how "stiff" he was, especially against George W. Bush, whom the media had already anointed as Mr. Authentic in 2000. Was the kiss a goofy and awkward moment? Sure. Does the kiss, coupled with the Gores' separation ten years later somehow illustrate something deep about what Al Gore feels? Not at all.
So Easterbrook is still an idiot.
Of course it's Gore's fault that he allowed Easterbrook to criticize him by inventing the Internet. (Sorry.)
BTW, your Easterbrook link doesn't actually go to Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
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