As occupant of the Vice Presidency, the second most powerful office in the world, in an emergency Al Gore has to be ready to step in and assume the functions of Bill Clinton. As Clinton has made lying the compulsive/obsessive psychopathological hallmark of his Presidency, as Bubba’s second-in-command, Al Gore can be said to be a heartbeat away from bullshit.
The only thing anyone can learn by being in close proximity to Bill Clinton is how to perjure your ass off, and Gore has been not only an apt, but also an eager pupil. As Vice President, he began patterning himself after Bill Clinton, America’s world class perjurer. Before scheduling outdoor speeches, Bubba and Al have to determine whose turn it is to wear the lightening rod. Recently, Al went on record. “I didn’t know that thing at the Buddhist temple was a fundraiser, I thought it was a Manchurian bar mitzvah.” Since uttering that barefaced fabrication, people in Washington introduce the Gores to others as Tipper and Whopper.
Al’s not as artful a flimflammer as his mentor, but in his yokel impercipience, he rationalizes, “If I tell a lie often enough it must be true, or I wouldn’t be telling it all the time.” What a mentality! Al also noticed, in the Clinton White House, style trumps substance, ergo, he has re-programmed to look and sound like a zealot. He has raised his vocal decibel count to where he sounds like a lady longshoreman with a bullhorn trying to voice-activate Janet Reno’s vibrator, and has adapted the frenzied bravado of a spastic Tasmanian devil with an over-wound mainspring on methamphetamines. Only the earth tone “schmattes” he now wears, his backslapping chumminess-in-overkill demeanor and the obscene bias of the media makes him seem different, but to paraphrase Gertrude Stein – a Gore is a Gore is a Gore. Despite this disguise (cover up might be the more apt word) he’s still the same plodding dolt he always was, and what follows is a solemn insistence on that.
Since the beginning of time, homo sapiens have been in a gallant struggle to crawl out of the Mesozoic primordial ooze and become civilized. Apparently, Al Gore hasn’t been trying. Despite the vapid non-sequitur statements that crumble from his oral aperture like stale graham cracker crumbs, supporters of Al Gore insist he’s not senile, just prematurely dull. His office staff has been instructed to explain away this circumstance by telling visiting dignitaries, “You may not find the Vice President’s company very scintillating. He just stepped away from his personality for a few years.”
Trying to engage Al Gore verbally is like trying to open a conversation with a sardine key. His public pronouncements are about as shallow as a birdbath. Compared with Al Gore, Al Bundy sounds more intellectual than Bill Buckley. Even reading off a Teleprompter, Gore can’t make it through “How’s the family?” without tripping over his lips.
Al Gore is not possessed of a sparkling wit. When he gets through telling a joke in a forest, even the birds shrug. Gore carries a Valium capsule in his wallet for identification. Bill Gates uses Al Gore’s picture for his “sleep screen.” Paradoxically, Gore regards himself as a shrewd operator, despite being the only guy in Washington ever to accept an I.O.U from Bill Clinton because it was co-signed by Spiro Agnew.
While still in the womb, an obstetrician declared Al the first fetus in history to require pre-natal rehabilitation. At an early age, Gore showed definite flashes of dull. Even his computer wouldn’t play games with him. In fact, he was so lethargic the family dog was assigned to teach him to sit and beg for “uppers.”
Al Gore describes himself as “an average guy”, accurate when you consider, in his hometown, the average guy walks with his knuckles dragging along the ground. Al does have the Tennessee brand of savoir-faire, knowing intuitively, at the dinner table, to scratch himself with the correct fork.
Al Gore was born March 31, 1948. The next fifty-two years of his life were uneventful. Clinging to his country roots, he showed up for his inauguration wearing a bib tuxedo. He is the only Vice President ever sworn into office with his left hand resting on a balloon while his right hand was playing with his lips.
Al was a chubby kid. At the seashore, the family would wrap him in an American flag and tell people he was a beach ball. To this day, people still ask him, “How do you manage to stay out of shape?” (One little boy tore up his autograph after realizing Al was not The Swamp Thing.)
Early on, the Gore family noticed Al was “slow.” His parents stopped buying him sweaters because he kept trying to put his head through the sleeve. Doctors described his condition as a case of inoperable butterfingers.
In just one week:
– Al got his hand caught in a towel and the Fire Department had to come and get him out.
– he wandered into a corner of the room and the Fire Department had to come and get him out.
– he got trapped in the bathroom and accidentally locked the door from both sides, and the Fire Department had to come and get him out.
– he caught his head in a pencil sharpener, and the Fire Department had to come and get him out.
Ultimately, his parents had to choose between putting him up for adoption or opening a charge account with the Fire Department.
It was apparent to the family, Al was prone to injure himself. Until he became eighteen, he had to eat with a rubber fork. They took away all his toys that were sharp or pointy, and he still managed to cut his hand on a tennis ball.
Mentally and physically inept, it took a team of spelunkers to find his I.Q. By the age of five, he had to wear training wheels on his cap and curbfeelers on his shoes. The family sent him to a special school for the hard-of-thinking, but had to withdraw him when he just couldn’t keep up with the rest of the class. (His teacher just couldn’t find him a pencil that was “user-friendly,”)
It took young Al at least half-hour to use a urinal because, before he could find his dork he had to remember where he saw it last. He knew to open a zipper he would have to pull it in a downward direction, but always had trouble remembering the way back.
Neighbors felt sorry for the Gores but camouflaged their true feelings with guarded compliments, such as, “Say, folks, that kid of yours certainly has a neck on his shoulders.”
Al still retains most of those “down-home” qualities he had as a boy. Only his attitude toward smoking changed from the time when he grew up on the Gore family tobacco plantation called Lungbuster Farms. Al faced his first big decision as a farm boy when he struggled to decide which vegetable to choose as his role model.
Al Gore likes to tells people he went to M.I.T (actually, the Massachusetts Institute of Tennessee.) At college, he took a series of aptitude tests, which revealed he was uniquely qualified either to live off his father or get a job as a doorstop. As we all know, he never lived up to that early promise.
In college, Al wanted girls to believe he was a weight lifter, so he had a plastic surgeon give him a cosmetic hernia scar. The first time he went for skiing lessons, the ski instructor said, “Mr. Gore, this is the last time I’m going to tell you. The pants go on first, and then the skis!
As a young Congressman, Gore is remembered for his statement, “Nothing should be done for the first time, and if it should, it shouldn’t be now.” After that, each time he strode to the lectern, the Speaker of the House would whisper to the Sergeant-at-Arms, “Stand by with the cargo net.”
With Al Gore actively pursuing his ambition to become President, a psychiatrist has diagnosed him as suffering from delusions of adequacy. After his recent out-of left-field assertion that he invented the Internet, his doctor ordered a MRI examination of Gore’s skull, which revealed his brain’s hard drive had crashed. Fortunately, Al never kept anything important stored on it. His doctor, a world famous neurosurgeon, documents Al’s case in a medical journal article entitled, “How to Gift Wrap a Lobotomy.” Gore has already had a brain transplant operation and was in fact the donor. Of course, the operation was a failure, but Al still likes to take down his pants to show people the scar.
Folks that know Al Gore best would say, “Al Gore would never occupy (as they call it in Tennessee), the Oval Shed. They said, “Al has a great future behind him because the Vice Presidency is as far as he well ever go. However, they did not anticipate the Republican’s Heaven’s Gate death wish and need to commit political suicide by choosing as their standard bearer a dimbulb who couldn’t break even in a debate with either Larry, Moe, or Curly.
Al Gore keeps assuring the President he doesn’t mind waiting patiently for Clinton’s term to come to an end, but it is frequently reported he’s wandering around the White House endlessly muttering, “Where is John Wilkes Booth now that I need him?”