Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (John Tierney Edition)

John Tierney snipes at Al Gore:

Gore Pulls His Punches - New York Times: Gore isn't exactly likable in the film -- he still has that wooden preachiness and is especially hard to watch when he tries to be funny. Yet you end up admiring him for his nerdly persistence. He turned out to be right about something important: global warming is a problem worth worrying about.

But the story he tells in the movie is hardly "an inconvenient truth." It's not really true, and it's certainly not inconvenient for him or his audience....

[E]ven as propaganda, the film is ultimately unsatisfying. Gore doesn't mind frightening his audience with improbable future catastrophes, but he avoids any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries.

He doesn't propose the quickest and most efficient way to reduce greenhouse emissions: a carbon tax on gasoline and other fossil fuels. The movie gives him a forum for talking sensibly about a topic that's taboo on Capitol Hill, but he instead sticks to long-range proposals that sound more palatable, like redesigning cities to encourage mass transit or building more efficient cars and appliances...

Would it have strained John Tierney's brain to tell his readers that Gore did propose a carbon tax back in 1993, got no backup at all from John Tierney and company, and lost? That the topic is "taboo on Capitol Hill" in large part because John Tierney and company gave Gore no backup when he tangled with the American Petroleum Institute a decade ago?

But that would undermine John Tierney's narrative, wouldn't it? John Tierney is in the business of trying to paint Gore as an unlikeable coward, isn't he?