Captain Planet for veep

Gore says that "modified free markets" are the wave of the future and argues that "free men and women who take individual responsibility for a particular part of the earth are, by and large, its most effective protectors, defenders, and stewards." However, his ritual praise of free markets and private property rings hollow. Under the rubric "Strategic Environment Initiative," Gore presses for a full-blown industrial policy to encourage the development of "environmentally friendly" technologies. To accomplish this, Gore proposes "the establishment of rigorous and sophisticated technology assessment procedures, paying dose attention to all the costs and benefits-both monetary and ecological--" of new technologies. Gore would also interfere with free international trade by creating an agency to "assess a technology's ecological effect--" before allowing it to be exported, and by including ecological criteria in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

In June, Gore burnished his foreignpolicy credentials by leading the official U.S. Senate delegation to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he had to look on while (as he asserted in his acceptance speech) President Bush "embarrassed our nation when the whole world was asking for American leadership in confronting the environmental crisis." Gore bashed the Bush Administration for "gutting" the Global Climate Change Treaty by not committing to a specific timetable for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions. (It's bad enough that by signing the treaty, the U.S. officially accepted the notion that "global warming" is a real problem.) Despite his expressed devotion to protecting intellectual property rights, Gore wanted the U.S. to sign the seriously flawed Biodiversity Treaty, which would have crippled our budding biotechnology industry by compromising patent protection. Companies could have been required to license their technology to developing countries without compensation and to pay extortionate sums to Third World nations for access to their wild plants and animals as sources for genes to be used to bioengineer new medicines and crops.

During a press conference shortly after President Bush's speech at the Earth Summit, Gore earnestly and repeatedly said that the world needed and was awaiting U.S. leadership. Every time Gore mentioned the world's yearning for American leadership, the representatives of the Third World in the room would audibly groan or mutter angrily under their breaths. Earnest Al just didn't get it-- they don't want U.S. leadership, they want U.S. dollars.

Al Gore once told Vanity Fair, "I honestly and sincerely believe that I know exactly what needs to be done. And I am impatient to do it." Let's hope the voters won't give this sincere radical a chance to do it. And let's hope they remember whose judgment put him on the ticket.

IN THE 1970s a particularly raunchy book, heading for the best-seller list in Britain, drew the attention of the satirical magazine Private Eye. The editors of Private Eye, knowing that a campaign against such a book will simply arouse public interest in it, took a different tack: they published a list of the juiciest pages so that the curious could read them in the bookstore without contributing to the author's coffers.