Something political

So anyway, in that USA Today article about The Day After Tomorrow, former Vice President Al Gore sees this as an opportunity for political action:

Former vice president Al Gore has rallied behind the film and plans a series of town hall meetings to discuss global warming. [...]

"The movie is fiction, of course," Gore tells USA TODAY. "And it's important we separate fact from fiction. But it raises an extremely serious issue. We do face a climate crisis. It should be seen as a genuine global emergency."

Gore says that he and environmental groups see Tomorrow as a chance to discuss an issue the public has long ignored.

"People are going to walk out of the movie, and they're going to talk about this issue one way or the other," he says. "I see it as an opportunity to join with the scientific community to set the record straight."

I'm going to address the following comments to the handful of people who think this is a perfectly sensible springboard for Al Gore to be using. Let us suppose for a moment that another former Veep, take Dan Quayle for example, had used the impending release of Armageddon to argue for massively-increased government funding in the search for near-earth objects. Or had used the impending release of Independence Day to announce a series of public meetings into the importance of funding SETI projects. A tsunami of scorn and ridicule would have inundated the news cycle for the better part of a week.

Indeed, I think that Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow would have been at the forefront of belittling the Veep, proclaiming "It's just entertainment." And yet he thinks that Day After Tomorrow has "a message."

Note for the future: Directors like to say their movie has "a message" until they start catching a lot of flak, after which the movie reverts to "just entertainment." Got it?