Here’s an interesting article from SLATE on Gore’s lies:
http://politics.slate.msn.com/code/kausfiles/kausfiles.asp?Show=4/3/00&idMessage=5002
Among the highlights:
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[li]While Erich Segal admits that Gore was a partial inspiration for the male lead in ‘Love Story’, he claims that Tipper was not in any way an inspiration for the female lead. But more importantly, he TOLD Gore this shortly before Gore made that famous statement. It seems Gore deliberately embellished the story because it sounded good that way, even though he knew it absolutely wasn’t true.[/li]
[li]In the current campaign, Gore has said he “always, always, always” supported Roe vs. Wade, and “always supported a woman’s right to choose.”[/li]
In fact, his early voting record was quite Pro-life, and he received a grade of 84% from the National Right to Life committee for his pro-life voting record.
[li]In 1987 Gore told the Des Moines Register that as an investigative reporter he had gotten “a bunch of people indicted and sent to jail.”[/li]
In fact, two people were indicted, and of the two one was acquitted and the other given a suspended sentence. Richard Nixon actually wrote a letter to Gore in 1987 telling him not to be “discouraged by the flack you are getting about possibly exaggerating your achievements as an investigative reporter.” It would seem that Gore already had a reputation for embellishing the truth by 1987.
[li]Gore recently said that he supported the McCain-Feingold bill in the Congress, but Feingold wasn’t even elected to congress until a year after Gore was already gone. Later, during the primaries Gore embellished even this, and said of McCain-Feingold that “unlike Sen. Bradley, I was a co-sponsor of it.”[/li]
[li]According to Gore biographer Bill Turque, “For years, Gore described to friends how he’d helped add stirring rhetoric to Hubert Humphrey’s acceptance speech at the 1968 Democratic convention.”[/li]
It turns out that Gore once talked to a columnist who had ties to Humphrey, but that columnist had nothing to do with that election. Gore later claimed that it was ‘faulty memory’.
[li]Speaking of his Vietnam days, Gore told the Baltimore Sun he had “walked through the elephant grass and … was fired upon.”[/li]
It never happened. Gore was never in an active combat zone.
[li]Gore told students in Concord, N.H., that after a high-school student tipped him off to toxic-waste problems in Toone, Tenn., in the late 1970s, “I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee–that was the one that you didn’t hear of. But that was the one that started it all.”[/li]
The problem is that the ‘little place called Love Canal’ that he found was already the subject of national media attention, and the entire town had already been evacuated.
[li]In discussing Bill Bradley’s proposed expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit in Time Magazine, Gore said, “I was the author of that proposal. I wrote that, so I say, welcome aboard. That is something for which I have been the principal proponent for a long time.”[/li]
The EITC became law a year before Gore entered Congress. Even later on, Gore was never the ‘Principal Proponent’ of the EITC, which had a very large, bipartisan support base in Congress.
[li]At a debate in Iowa, Gore asked “a couple of friends” in the audience to stand, gesturing to two mothers.[/li]
It simply wasn’t true. Under Bradley’s proposal they would have been eligible for $417/mo.
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Note that the CNN article was written back in April, before any of these latest ‘fibs’ came along.
Once again, I find the disturbing thing about these stories is that they are mostly utterly trivial. Why did he have to tell the reporter that Tipper was the inspiration for the female lead, when he knew it wasn’t so? Wasn’t it a good enough story that he WAS the inspiration for the male lead? Why can’t he just say, “I’m a strong proponent of the EITC”, instead of claiming that he wrote it and was its principle champion? And he DOES have a strong record of environmental advocacy, so why make up lies about Love Canal?
I think it all points to a person that is deeply insecure about himself. Gore had an extremely strong and influential father, and if you read his life story you find lots of evidence that his father pushed him around like crazy. Some friends of his have said that Gore would have been much happier as an academic, but his father would never allow it.
Children of fathers like this often wind up having to ‘prove’ themselves over and over again. In Gore’s case, this manifests itself as compulsive embellishment of his own achievements. At least, that’s my 2-bit pop psych take on it.