Guest Post by Morbo
Last Sunday I picked up The Washington Post’s “Book World” and was greeted with a pleasant surprise: Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” was number one on the non-fiction bestsellers list.
The kook right is apoplectic. Movement loyalists are desperately seeking to discredit the book — but their first salvo was a weak one indeed.
Andrew Ferguson, an editor at the Weekly Standard, has discovered that a quote by Abraham Lincoln that Gore uses in the book is probably fake. It appears Lincoln never said it.
It’s an unfortunate mistake. Based on the book’s endnotes, it looks like Gore relied on a faulty source — an encyclopedia about Lincoln published in 1950. But it’s also the kind of error that can be corrected in future editions with no damage to Gore’s underlying thesis.
Gore’s book is not about Lincoln. It’s about the role of reason in American life at the start of the 21st Century. His thesis is that reason is increasingly being abandoned in public discourse, especially political life. Perhaps instead of singling out one error, Ferguson could offer us something that actually responds to Gore’s central idea.
Most non-fiction books contain mistakes. Errors made by researchers years ago are repeated in more contemporary works. For years, right wingers have paraded about a supposed quote by James Madison, the father of the Constitution and our fourth president, lauding the Ten Commandments as the basis of the American government. Madison neither believed nor said such nonsense — he was, after all, one of the architects of secular government — and the quotation was debunked years ago. It is still on hundreds of right-wing website today.
Sloppiness by the kook right does not excuse Gore’s mistake, of course. But I have no doubt that Gore, a card-carrying member of the reality based community, will correct his error. That makes a difference.
In an attempt to dress up his column as something more than just a smear on Gore, Ferguson goes on to accuse other writers of trying to co-opt Lincoln over the years. But make no mistake, his main reason for writing it was to take a cheap shot at a man the right wingers fear because he is a true public intellectual. Deep down, they all know that in a formal debate, Gore would mop would mop up the floor with any of them.
(While I’m at it, I might note that other liberal bloggers have pointed out that the first sentence of Ferguson’s column reads: “You can’t really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, ‘The Assault on Reason.'” Actually, Gore’s book contains 20 pages of endnotes. One wonders if Ferguson has actually read — or indeed even seen — “The Assault on Reason.”)
Gore’s new bestseller proves that he is capable of synthesizing complex ideas and presenting them to the public in an appealing package that flies off the bookstore shelves. Compare him to a few of the right wing’s recent best-selling authors. They offer the nation juvenile works written on a fourth-grade level by people like Ann Coulter, Bernard Goldberg and Sean Hannity.
Yes, Gore made a mistake. He’s still about 1,000 times brighter than any of the dim bulbs the right wing has to offer.