The "Invention" of the Internet
   
In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer March 9, 1999, Gore said "during my service in the US Congress, "I took the initiative in creating the internet." This is corroborated by none other than Newt Gingrich in an September 1, 2000 CSPAN panel: "Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an internet." 
   
What Gore said was different: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet." Gore was indeed in the forefront of legislative initiatives to create the internet. As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network."
   
Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.  
   
As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation.
   
   
"Love Story"
    
Robert Parry reported in the April, 2000 Washington Monthly "When the author, Erich Segal, was asked ... he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrettt IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones."  (NY Times, Dec. 14, 1997).  Gore noted his involvement in "Love Story" in a two-hour interview with Time correspondent, Karen Tumulty, and asked that it be kept "off the record."  Tumulty violated that request, and the rest is history.
   
The Boston Globe's Walter Robinson and Ann Scales attacked Gore's veracity: "He has also said that he and his wife, Tipper, were the models for the movie Love Story, only to be contradicted by the author, Erich Segal."  Their source was Time magazine.  Trouble is, Gore never made that claim and Segal never contradicted him.  Chatting on the press plane about movies for a couple of hours, Gore had simply remarked to two Time magazine writers on a newspaper interview in which Segal had described Al and Tipper as his models for the movie.  True.  The Tennessean did so report, but it misquoted Segal, who had told the reporter he based only the male in the movie on Gore.  So Segal's "contradiction" was a correction for a newspaper, not Gore.  Segal noted: "Al attributed it to a newspaper.  Time thought it was more piquant to leave that out."  End of story?  Not a bit.  Heavyweight commentators seized on Love Story to lash Gore for "inflating his past", "bragging" and "prevaricating".
   
   
Love Canal 
   
Visiting Concord High School in New Hampshire, Gore urged the students not to be cynical about politics.  He said he had been stimulated to hold hearings on toxic waste at Toone, Tennessee, and the Love Canal, New York, by a letter from a high school student.  "It all happened because one high school student got involved."  The Washington Post and the Washington Times turned that into Gore saying: "I was the one that started it all."  It continues to be recycled as a "typical" Al Gore lie.  What Gore actually said was "that was the one that started it all."  "That" referred to toxic waste in Toone, Tennessee.  Gore also noted that the Toone situation drew his attention to Love Canal.  (He made no claim to have been actively involved in the Love Canal case).  The very next day, Gore's statement "that was the one that started it all" was morphed by the Washington Post into "I was the one that started it all."  Immediately thereafter, the Republican National Committee changed that to "I was the one who started it all," and falsely re-directed the reference from Toone, Tennessee, to Love Canal.  Did the media drop a flag on that play?  No Way!  And so the myth was born, and continues to flourish today.
   
   
The Farm Boy 
   
"My father taught me how to clear land with a double-headed axe . . . how to plough a steep hillside with a team of mules."   Nicholson faxed the celebrity press corps that Gore was lying because he was really brought up in the posh Fairfax Hotel in Washington. In fact, as even critical biographers confirm, Gore's Dad did make him spend long tough summers doing backbreaking chores on the family farm.
   
   
The Florida School
   
Gore's story in the first debate of the overcrowded Florida classroom was entirely true at the time the Gore was given the letter by the student's father, and continued to be true for several days afterward.  Gore never claimed that the student was condemned to stand in the classroom for the entire year.  Embarrassed by the national attention, the Principal issued a false denial that the GOP put to immediate use, without bothering to check the facts—ironically, the exact failure of responsibility that they attributed to Gore.
   
   
Case in Point 
   
Two days before the election, Gore said the following at a Black church in Detroit: "When my opponent, Gov. Bush, says that he will appoint 'strict constructionists'  to the Supreme Court I often think of the 'strictly constructionist' meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written—how some people were considered three-fifths of a human being."  (Transcribed from Gore's voice on a videotape).  Immediately after showing this clip, Ollie North on MSNBC rhetorically asked Senator Barbara Boxer, "Do you honestly believe that George Bush will restore slavery in America?"  And Chris Matthews followed the same clip with the query: "Do you think that it was fair pool there to say that a Bush appointed Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution the way it was interpreted before it was amended after the Civil War— to treat black people as if they were only three-fifths of a person?  Do you think that is what a Bush Supreme Court would do really?  C'mon, you guys are really unbelievable!  ..And they are going to enforce the fugitive slave law too!  I mean, how bad are they?"
   
Any moderately intelligent individual with a modicum sense of fair play would recognize Gore's remark as an argumentum ad absurdum—an attempt to demonstrate the historical absurdity of "strict constructionism."  Here on MSNBC was another smear-in-the-making, with a genesis almost identical to the "invented-the-internet" myth.  Only the proximity to the election cut this slander short.
   
Gore's opponents, it seems, were thus in the strange position of concocting and perpetuating lies to "prove" that Gore concocts lies.  And in the tradition of Josef Goebbels, they understand that if a lie is told often enough, it eventually becomes a "given" indisputable "truth." Hence the drumbeat litany of "Love Store" and "Inventing the Internet."  And the press, by and large, not only failed to expose this outrage -- it participated in it.  And yet we are still expected to believe (as so many do) that there is a "liberal media bias."
    
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These are only a few of the myths explained on the "Gore in 2004" website. We highly recommend you go there for a visit: http://www.algoresupportcenter.com/goretruth.html
   
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