Topic: NewsBusters
Now that Noel Sheppard has apparently decided not to accept our challenge to support his unsubstantiated claim that Al Gore is into global warming activism only for the Benjamins, it was inevitable that someone else would pick up that misleading lilttle ball.
Enter Matthew Vadum, editor of Organization Trends and Foundation Watch, two newsletters issued by the conservative Capital Research Center. In an April 1 NewsBusters post, Vadum claimed that Gore was "profiteering" on global warming by heading a private equity firm that invests in "green" companies and technology. "Little is known about his shadowy firm’s finances, where it gets funding and what projects it supports," Vadum asserts, without explaining if all private-equity firms are, or should be, held to the same standard. He also derisively calls Gore "Saint Albert of Carthage, Tennessee."
Vadum kept up the hate in a April 6 post, starting with a false claim off the bat -- that Gore famously claimed to have invented the Internet." (We debunked this eight years ago.) Vadum claimed that a spokesman gave "a snotty response" when he denied Vadum's profiteering allegations.
Vadum went on to call Gore's global warming activism a "Chicken Little routine" and he suggests throughout that Gore is only doing this for the money. But correlation does not equal causation: because Gore is making some money related to his global warming activism does not mean that it's the only reason he's doing it. (We thought that conservatives believed making money was a good thing.) Nowhere does Vadum offer evidence that his beliefs are not sincere.
Vadum even attacks Gore's speaking fees:
And let’s not forget that Gore now makes $175,000 a speech. Are people paying Gore not to talk about global warming, his policy forte, in his speeches? He sure isn’t making that kind of money for his oratory by enthralling crowds with fascinating tales from his time as Vice President of the United States, an office a previous holder once described as not being worth “a bucket of warm p---.” By comparison, the rhetorical gifts of both Dan Quayle and Walter Mondale go for a more affordable $30,000 (per speech), or less.
We would argue that Vadum, as an employee of a right-wing think tank that has attacked Gore, is doing it for the money to a greater extent than Gore is.
UPDATE: Welcome, visitors from CRC. We respond to Vadum here.
