Al Gore says he’s terrified for Obama


Had dinner with Al last night and he’s like, “Man oh man, I can’t believe the way Barack is going after the Clintons. At first I thought this guy must have the biggest pair of brass balls I’ve ever seen but lately I’m starting to think that it’s not that, it’s that he just doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. You think that could be true? Like he’s never heard of Vince Foster?”

I’m like, Dude, please tell me I’m not hearing what I think I’m hearing.

Al’s like, “Trust me, I spent eight years living in close proximity to these people and I can assure you, Tipper and I were terrified the entire time. You know how people talk about someone who’ll stop at nothing? That’s the Clintons. They run the party. They own it. And one thing they made perfectly clear was that this is going to be Hillary’s year. We all got the word. Kerry got a call. So did I. Stay the fuck out of the race. Frankly, I didn’t need the call, and they knew it, but they made it anyway. It’s how they do things. Sure, they’d allow nutbags like Kucinich to run and make it look like a race. Edwards got to stay in so that Hillary would have a smarmy lawyer type prick to beat up on stage, which always goes over big with the man-haters who make up the core of her base. Plus he had the wife being sick thing to give him an out. Basically the deal was that if Edwards really started getting some momentum they’d give him a choice — bow out saying your wife needed you, or end up in a park, ruled a suicide.

“You do realize that they undermined my campaign and Kerry’s campaign so that we’d have eight years of Monkey Boy in the White House and everybody would be sick of the Republicans and begging for a Democrat? You realize that, right? I mean imagine if I’d won in 2000 and served eight years. You think Hillary could be running on my wind? Worse yet, imagine Kerry had won in 2004. He’d be running now for re-election as an incumbent. They totally destroyed his campaign. That Swift Boat stuff? It’s got the Clintons all over it. Kerry knows it, too. That’s why he’s backing Obama. There’s a whole bunch of us who’d just love to see the Clintons knocked off. But none of us really dares to take them on. We like being alive a little too much, you know?

“But then along came Obama. I can’t believe he didn’t get the phone call. So he knows the deal. He’s not supposed to be there. He’s definitely not supposed to win. Really, honestly, I fear for the guy. Because frankly, I really like him. He’s smart. He’s funny. He means well. Great wife and kids. Just a really, really nice young family. I’d love to see him in the White House. Heck, I’d love to be his vice president. I just pray that he knows what he’s doing. Who knows? Maybe he does. Maybe he’s figured out how to stop these evil bastards. I hope so. Because someone needs to.”

Then the dessert came — I had my usual cup of hot water, with lemon — and the conversation moved along to Al’s new venture, which is this Kleiner-funded company that’s buying up all this land in the mountains and building these big compounds up there for when the global warming floods start and the coastal regions get destroyed. High-elevation fortified housing, it’s called. HEFs is the nickname. Basically big bunkers up in the Rockies that are super expensive and basically look like really nice ski houses but can be converted into bunkers when the muggles get washed out of their houses and there’s no food and no fuel and they all come scrambling up into the mountains because they’ve heard the rich folks are up there with supplies. Fifty million a pop for a starter home but you’ll have a huge food stockpile and walls that can’t be pierced by rockets. Active defense — which means machine guns, rocket launchers, a weapons cache, plus a security team to operate the gear — costs extra but is totally worth it, Al says.

“We’re already taking orders,” Al says. “Tipper and I are building ours in Idaho. We’d love to have you as neighbors. It’s gonna be bad, Steve. Real bad. I know it’s hard to imagine but I’ve seen the charts and the graphs and we’re talking about a global catastrophe. Picture it. You’ve got millions of displaced persons flooded out of their homes, and they’re out there on the roads. They’re starving. There’s people dying. The power grid is down. The ATMs have stopped working. It’s like Mad Max. Or that Cormac McCarthy novel. Have you read that book? It’s amazing.”

I told him of course I’d read that Cormac McCarthy book though of course I haven’t and neither has Al and my theory is that nobody actually reads Cormac McCarthy books they just buy them and pretend to read them because honestly they’re fucking impossible to read since the guy doesn’t use punctuation and he writes these run-on sentences that just go on and on and he uses all these weird big words that nobody understands and it’s like reading goddamn Shakespeare who is another one that I swear nobody actually reads they just say they did and then they watch the Kenneth Branagh movie instead.