Al Gore the Winner

Al Gore wins the Nobel Prize for Peace. Well, actually, he won a Nobel for creating a PowerPoint presentation based on UN data and filming it, which is why he had to share the 1.5 million dollar prize with four other people. (When you're worth over 100 million, it's easy to donate that $375K to charity, by the way.)

I think losing the 2000 election was the best thing that could have happened to that man. He wins an Oscar, and then the Nobel prize. He also went from a moderately rich guy to a fabulously rich guy who is famous in his own right and gets to hang out with celebrities and push political policy from the sidelines, unfettered with the rules and spotlight of politics.

Now people are saying, 'Why isn't he running for President?' My question is, why would he? First off, he'd have to run against the Clintons, which wouldn't be cool (and the new Al Gore is the epitome of cool). Then, if he won, he'd have to actually hunker down and run the country and deal with the global issues of international politics.

Who the hell would want that when he has free reign to do what he wants, and successfully tackle the issues he's most interested in. Take on getting us out of Iraq? That's an impossible job and whoever gets stuck with it isn't going to have much time for rock concerts.

Oh, and a quick aside about the Nobel Prize… Other past winners of the Peace Prize include Henry Kissinger and (bum bum BUM) Yasser Arafat, the god father of the Middle East… Actually, Kissinger is pretty cool, and he got it for negotiating a peace settlement with Viet Nam (which didn't stick, but who's counting).

But I kind of think that if you're going to award such a big award, it ought to have a few years to make sure it's a good idea. I'm not Catholic, but they wait for people to die to canonize them. Heck, you have to be dead to get on a US stamp (unless you're a cartoon character, which while not a living being, they do have careers that continue to change our perception of them).

Of course, peace is such a subjective idea that we couldn't really wait. After all, Nixon gets all the crap for Viet Nam these days, even though his administration got us out, and Kennedy is the golden boy of the 20th Century, even though he got us into Viet Nam.

So, congrats Mr. Gore, and to the physicists who made all this electronic storage possible (oh, maybe you missed the Nobel prize for Physics -- some kind of electromagnetic signature that makes terabyte drives possible… But that's just fundamental changes in the way the world works, not a rock star politician, so we'll ignore it for now…)