A public service announcement: Gore not a hypocrite

In Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he briefly comments on his sister's death from lung cancer and how that eventually led to his family's decision to give up tobacco farming and fight against cigarettes.

The wingnuts have decided to smear Gore by claiming that back in 1996, he claimed in a speech to the Democratic National Convention that he had an epiphany when his sister died and immediately committed himself to the anti-smoking campaign. They then point out:

America learned that contrary to his rhetoric, in 1988 Gore campaigned as a tobacco farmer who told his brethren that "all of my life," I hoed it, chopped it, shredded it, "put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it." The year his sister died, Gore helped the industry by fighting efforts to put the words "death" and "addiction" on cigarette-warning labels.

The obvious purpose is to portray Gore as a hypocrite.

As usual with the wingnuts' stories, this story simply ISN'T TRUE. His claim in the 1996 was not that he immediately had a change of heart about smoking. Then and now, he explains it took years for the lesson to sink in before he actually decided to take on the tobacco interests.


Glenn Greenwald has the full explanation.