Same Ol' Gore.

IN case you haven't heard, there's a "new Al Gore" in town. Time magazine's Ana Marie Cox dubs him a "rock star." Frank Rich, The New Republic, the Washington Post, The American Prospect, and the rest of the liberal media establishment have similarly prostrated themselves before the new Al Gore. The Gore boomlet coincides, unsurprisingly, with the release of his new film, An Inconvenient Truth, which countless liberals have hailed as the Silent Spring of global warming.

Arianna Huffington, whose gifts for prostration are legendary, penned a dispatch from Cannes, where Gore was promoting his movie. Amid her gushing, she reported that Gore told her that this was his second trip to Cannes. "The first," he said, "was when I was fifteen years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists--Sartre, Camus ... We were not allowed to speak anything but French!" "Which," surmised Huffington, "may explain his pitch-perfect French accent."

In a column for the L.A. Times, I expressed my skepticism about all of the above. There is no new Al Gore; the only thing that is new, I explained, is the Democrats' sudden pre-buyer's remorse over Hillary Clinton--whose implausible sprint to the center strikes too many liberals as plausible. Gore, meanwhile, has everything liberals want in a president. He may not be an official victimized minority--say, a black hermaphrodite--but he was "robbed" of the presidency by George W. Bush, so he counts as a victim. Moreover, he's screamed a lot about how evil President Bush is, endorsed Howard Dean, and revived his global-warming Jeremiah act (which he kept under wraps in 2000). This has caused liberals to herd themselves into one of the greatest examples of wishful-groupthink in recent memory.

In that column, I called attention to the fact that Gore's recollection of whiling away his summer in France ribbiting about Camus runs counter to the facts as presented in several reputable biographies of Gore (which also report that Gore received mediocre grades in French throughout high school). He was supposed to be clearing a hillside with an axe and a plow when he was 15, not debating No Exit in French. Was not this the same serial exaggerator who claimed to be the inspiration of Love Story, and to have invented the Internet?

The liberal blogs exploded in outrage. The mouth-breathing zealots of the Democratic Underground launched an e-mail jihad against me. One writer at The American Prospect fumed that I had "smeared" Gore. The Center for American Progress played shoot-the-messenger, sarcastically promising to get to the bottom of this if I first agreed to provide a "comprehensive list of everything [I] ever did during the summer from age 6 through the age of 17." Again and again the defensive chorus raged: This is a trivial attack on a great man. Who cares what he did as a teenager?

I don't, really. But proving that the new savior of the Democratic party--and the planet!--is the same man he's always been strikes me as a perfectly legitimate point. And presumably a man who says that global warming "could bring the end of civilization" and that those who deny it are akin to Holocaust deniers should be vetted for his history of exaggerating. Indeed, Gregg Easterbrook, a liberal science writer, notes in Slate that "the picture [An Inconvenient Truth] paints is always worst-case scenario." There's a word for picking the worst-case scenario. It begins with "E."

Another intrepid liberal at the Prospect contacted Gore's operation and received supposed proof that my skepticism was unfounded: "Mr. Goldberg's insinuation is simply incorrect. Mr. Gore did indeed spend an educational week in Cannes during the summer when he was fifteen. That summer he also spent a great deal of time working on the family farm." From spending a summer studying existentialists ... to an "educational week" visiting Cannes.

But none dare call it exaggerating.