This article first appeared on The Rebel website.

hypocrisy |hiˈpäkrisē|

noun (pl. hypocrisies)

the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform; pretense.

Too many politicians lie, deceive, and fill their pockets with taxpayer’s money. As Henry Kissinger said, 90 percent of them give the other 10 percent a bad name. Thomas Jefferson noted, “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” People pay little attention because they expect nothing more. However, there is one behavior people despise above most others, regardless of political views, and that is hypocrisy.

Al Gore is a classic modern form of the career politician. All other career efforts fail, so they choose a vehicle in the form of a moral high ground issue. As H. L. Mencken said,

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front of the urge to rule.”

Gore tells us in his book An Inconvenient Truth (AIT) that his epiphany occurred after his son was seriously injured.

“I began to rethink everything, especially what my priorities had been.” “I made at least two enduring changes: I vowed always to put my family first, and I also vowed to make the climate crisis the top priority of my professional life.”

I guess he put his family first when he got involved in a sex case in Portland Oregon. It occurred in the same year he separated from his wife Tipper, the person to who he dedicated the AIT book. Hypocrisy, yes, but people tend to give leeway and understand these as typical of personal human problems that plague everyone.

The Daily Mail (UK) reports Gore’s wealth grew from $1.7 million to $200 million in just 13 years. Others put his net worth at $300 million. Again, most don’t begrudge someone making money. Apparently, the US Department of Justice was considering fraud charges. The claim is he identified CO2 as a problem then made money from the claim by selling carbon credits.

Then there is the case of the Nobel Prize he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for

his movie AIT. In the same week the Nobel Committee announced his Prize, a UK Court ruled that the movie was propaganda with nine scientific errors and could only be shown in classrooms with warnings and a documentary showing the counter-arguments.

Gore seemed untouched by the steady drip of these exposures. Then, in 2007 the Tennessee Center for Policy Research disclosed that his carbon footprint on just one of his houses was 20 times the national average. This exposure did more damage than anything up to that point.

A list of Al Gore’s hypocritical actions begins with the story

Did you hear the joke about the father of four telling everybody that overpopulation is killing the planet? Well, it’s not a joke, it’s Al Gore. Just when we thought we could go more than a month or two without new evidence of Al saying one thing and doing another, the father of four is taking hypocrisy to a new low, hectoring people about their need to make smarter birth choices to save the planet.

It is an extensive list. No wonder, in a previous version of this article I fell for a Twitter parody of Ontario Provincial Parliament member Glen Murray, a well-known supporter of global warming, purportedly exposing another Gore hypocrisy (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Twitter parody of Glen Murray

A parody is only effective if it is close to the truth.

Gore is not an unusual example of the ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ practice of too many politicians, he is an extreme example. The question is how long can Gore accumulate hypocrisies before he loses credibility. How long before people others learn he is doing more harm than good?