Al Gore, uncensored, in 'The Assault on Reason'

Al Gore is a man who's presidency was stolen from him. Rather than being bitter, he leads. His new book tells the world what he's been thinking. Knowing that honesty does not a president elect, he lays it all out in black and white for those who dare to read. Hopefully, a many uninformed Americans will read and become informed. Our way of life is threatened to the very core. And he is the only person telling us from a national bully pulpit.
BOOK REVIEW - Los Angeles Times

What he is telling us today — with the moral authority of a man who many believe was wrongly barred from the presidency — is that American democracy and indeed American society are in danger from the authoritarians of the right. Without much polite varnish, he warns that self-serving plutocrats and self-righteous theocrats have nearly banished reason from the public square; their machinations disable us as we try to confront the enormous problems that threaten our future. According to Gore, Americans cannot adequately protect the nation from terrorism because our ideas about national security have been distorted by fear and falsehoods. Nor can we address what he calls "the carbon crisis," potentially "the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization," because the truth about global warming has been obscured by industrial and government propaganda.


[..]His insistence on detail and thoroughness, which may seem like a personal tic in an era of sound bites, is rooted in his conviction that most Americans have little understanding of the world in which they live. He worries that mass alienation from politics and immersion in the entertainment culture along with poor civic education have created a population that is woefully uninformed.


He cites polls and studies showing that the majority of citizens know almost nothing about the Constitution or the system of checks and balances that forms the basic structure of American government.


In his same concluding chapter, however, he suggests that the Internet, a text-based medium that encourages participation rather than passivity, may still save us, if we only have the wit to preserve it from corporate encroachment. For someone who became intimately aware of the system's worst flaws, he remains remarkably optimistic that the emerging technologies will enable democracy's advocates to triumph.