Inconvenient Countdown: 3 Days

I'm getting my homies lined up for a viewing this Friday of An Inconvenient Truth, and I'm all a-twitter with excitement.

Check out this video from MSNBC's Countdown hosted over at Crooks and Liars, which takes a look at the "Swiftboating" of Al Gore over the last week--it's got all the hits, from comparisons to Hitler and Goebels to that f'in' hilarious ad about the good that CO2 does for us. Keith Olbermann's stand-in host interviews Ken Bazinet of the New York Daily News, who has some interesting commentary:

They're attacking Al Gore because he's the perfect messenger. He can articulate this. I spoke with someone who attended a screening of this film and one point that she made was that he really does a good job of simplifiying things that are very complicated to the untrained mind. I think that's very dangerous, if you can say in a simple declarative sentence what the problem is, back it up with science--I think that, really, you have a hot potato there and I think that the Right is very concerned about that. Potentially those folks who are on the payroll of Big Oil.

And Gore is starting to get a little feisty, according to the London Guardian:

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists".

In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming.

[...]

In the interview Mr Gore also distances himself from Tony Blair on the subject of nuclear power, which the prime minister has insisted is "back on the agenda with a vengeance". Mr Gore says he is "sceptical about it playing a much larger role," and that although it might have a part to play in Britain or China, it will not be "a silver bullet" in the fight against global warming.

[UPDATE] Here's some more thoughts on that Guardian interview from Tim Grieve over at Salon's War Room:

Here's a thought for Al Gore: If you're serious about "not trying to feed" or "stimulate" talk of a presidential run, if your "whole objective is to change the mind of the American public so all the presidential candidates in both parties will want to talk about global warming," if you're going to bristle when reporters try to push the conversation toward 2008 -- well, you might want to stop giving interviews like the one you just did with the Guardian.

[...]

Let's be clear here: There's nothing wrong about referring to the Bush administration or the Republican leaders in Congress as "rightwing extremists." With George W. Bush kowtowing to the religious right on judicial nominations and just about everything else, with Bill Frist pushing constitutional amendments against gay marriage and flag burning, with House leaders locked into a hard-line position on immigration, "rightwing extremists" seems like a pretty apt description from here.

But if Gore really wants people to focus on polar ice caps rather than on his own political ambitions -- if he wants to persuade people that "An Inconvenient Truth" isn't a partisan film -- then he'd probably be better off not throwing out the kind of red-meat political lines that are going to make their way into newspaper headlines and the cable chat shows.

Of course, maybe, just maybe, Gore knows exactly what he's doing. If you want to keep a "draft Gore" movement growing, wouldn't you go about firing up the base with exactly the sort of language Gore just used?

The Guardian put the 2008 question to Gore, and he responded with the latest iteration of his not-quite-a-denial denial. "I don't expect to be a candidate," Gore said, adding that he couldn't see any event coming down the pike that might change his mind. But pressed further, Gore made it clear that he's not making anything so clear. "I haven't made a Shermanesque statement," he said, "because it just seems odd to do so."