CNN compares Al Gore to Jerry Lewis (cross-posted at Daily Kos)

I'm in a hotel room in Ottawa, Canada, for a very serious conference on Afghanistan. Consequently I was watching CNN while getting dressed.

I don't know if it is on line somewhere, but someone should check Miles O'Brien's segment on American Morning about Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for Peace. What is the theme? Al Gore is more popular in Europe than in the U.S., just like Jerry Lewis! CNN then illustrates this profound point by showing a particularly moronic segment of The Nutty Professor. For you young people out there, this was a 1963 comedy (released just a few months, believe it or not, before Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove), about a science professor who drinks a potion to make himself handsome. I don't have time to search the archives of Cahiers du Cinema right now, but French film intellectuals reportedly found depths of irony in le Jerry that escaped Americans....

Just like Al Gore!

CNN cut to a segment with some discredited global warming skeptic (i.e. flat earther) for balance. American Morning played a quote of one of its own reporters claiming that Nobel Peace Prizes are political. Miles O'Brien reported from Oslo that Nordics love nothing more than Bush-bashing, and that approval of Bush is only 10-12 percent in Norway! He doesn't mention that it is currently hovering at 24 percent in the U.S. and falling.

Just to add to their attempt to be "fair and balanced," CNN adds (with no evidence whatever) that this is the prize that Bill Clinton would have liked to win for his Middle East peace efforts, but that instead it went to his Vice President. Who was "defeated" seven years ago by George W. Bush.

And there's more. Apparently, according to Miles O'Brien, as many as 90 percent of those credulous, Bush-bashing Europeans actually have confidence in the findings of science!!! As compared to a mere 50 percent of Americans, who apparently are wisely skeptical

There was more too, but I was too stunned to take notes. I never saw The Nutty Professor. But I did see Dr. Strangelove. In fact I saw it on my first date with the woman who is now my wife. Perhaps if CNN had existed in 1964 it would have illustrated a segment on the danger of nuclear war with an interview with General Jack D. Ripper arguing that the Soviet Union was trying to pollute our "precious bodily fluids" and balanced it with an interview with some "scientist."

Somebody should find the transcript and go over it line by line. Incredible.