The BP Oil Gusher and Al Gore’s Hypocritical Defense of the First Amendment

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 15, 2010

Al Gore is outraged by BP denying the media access to the Gulf. Gore cites a New York Times article published on June 9 that mentions BP and the Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center in Louisiana denying access to the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, had called the Coast Guard to get permission to fly in restricted airspace with the newspaper’s photographer.

Al Gore’s message to the media.

“This behavior is completely unacceptable. Access by reporters should be as unfettered as possible. This de facto form of censorship needs to stop,” writes Gore on his blog.

Gore is hardly a champion of the First Amendment. The former vice president and 2007 Nobel Laureate has denied access to the media on several occasions. During a conference in 2008 he made sure the media was not allowed.

“In a highly ironic move, Al Gore has barred the press from even attending his speech at the upcoming CTIA Wireless 2009 conference, the nation’s largest gathering of the wireless communications industry,” Sascha Segan wrote for PCMag in March of 2009. “The ban only applies to people with press badges. If you’re a corporate or personal blogger or Tweeter, apparently you can get in to the 4,000-seat auditorium where the speech will be held.”

Back in 1999, Gore said Comedy Central’s raunchy series South Park should be censored. In 2000, before the voting machines threw to vote to Bush the Lesser, Gore and his running mate Joe Leiberman suggested imposing state censorship on the film, music and video games industries for promoting supposedly violent entertainment.

Gore is upset because he cannot exploit images of the oil leak to promote his environmental agenda of clean cars, smart grids, carbon capture, solar, and of course carbon taxes.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Gore ran an ad for a ban on offshore drilling: “For me, this issue is not only an economic issue and a health issue, it is also a moral issue,” he said. “I think we have an obligation to do right by the environment.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

On May 21, writing for the New Republic, Gore compared the oil gusher to C02 emissions. “Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours,” Gore wrote.

Al Gore’s hypocrisy is indeed a thing of wonder. He controls between $250,000-$500,000 of Occidental Petroleum stock.

“Gore is also facing heat for his involvement in the sale by the Clinton administration of thousands of acres of oil-rich, publicly owned land to Occidental in 1997. The area is known as Elk Hills and it is located in Bakersfield, California. It is known as an ancestral land for Native American communities,” Democracy Now reported in 2000.

After the sale, Gore began disclosing between $500,000 and $1 million of his significantly more valuable stock.

Even the corporate media has taken note of Gore’s hypocrisy. “Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn’t mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either,” noted USA Today in 2006.

This article was posted: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 9:45 am

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