Mr. Gore Goes To... OK, I'm Sick Of That Joke

We've come a long way in seven years, from Al Gore being a Presidential candidate with an avalanche of free media who was told by his consultants not to even bring up global warming during his campaign, to a principled visionary returning triumphantly to the Capitol with a single-minded purpose, to ONLY push Congress to action on the climate change issue.

In a return he described as emotional, Gore testified before House panels that it is not too late to deal with climate change "and we have everything we need to get started."

Gore's return to Congress marked the first time he had been in the Capitol since 2001 when he was the defeated Democratic nominee still presiding over the Senate in his role as vice president [...]

"I want to testify today about what I believe is a planetary emergency — a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth," Gore told the House committees. "The consequences are mainly negative and headed toward catastrophic unless we act."

Gore gained international recognition with his Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," as perhaps the leading spokesman on dealing with global warming.

A former congressman and senator from Tennessee, Gore received a friendly reception from Democrats in Congress.

"Welcome back, welcome home," said Rep. John Dingell (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Considering how this White House deals with the issue of climate change, by having political hacks heavily edit scientific studies, it's a bit refreshing to see someone on Capitol Hill who isn't cooking the books.

To underscore their charges of the administration's oil-friendly stance, Democrats grilled an oil lobbyist who was hired by the White House to review government climate change documents and who made hundreds of edits that the lawmakers said minimized the impact of global warming.

"You were a spin doctor," Rep. John A. Yarmuth (D-Ky) told the lobbyist.

Gore has a book coming out too later this year, The Assault on Reason, ensuring even more free media coverage. And his insistence on prodding government to work on climate change has led to a renaissance of thought on the subject, and even a compromise energy bill that at least moves in the right direction.

For a guy who keeps saying he's not running for President, he's sure doing a lot of things you would expect from a guy who's running for President. And if he did jump in the race, he'd probably have my vote.