• Former Vice President of the United States
• Author of radical environmentalist work Earth in the Balance
• Partisan political activist

Al Gore is a former two-time Democratic vice president of the United States (during the Clinton administration, from 1993 to 2001) and an outspoken environmental and political activist.

First elected to the House of Representatives in 1977 from his home state of Tennessee, Gore was regarded as a Democratic centrist in his first years in office, although he argued for a policy of managed coexistence with the Soviet Union; opposed President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (though he supported Reagan's deployment of INF missiles in Europe); advocated a freeze on nuclear weaponry; and voted to slash the Reagan Administration's defense budget. In 1991 he was one of the few Senate Democrats to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf War.

At one time in his political career, Gore opposed abortion. During his tenure in the U.S. House (1977 to 1984), he voted "pro-life" 27 times and had an 84 percent pro-life voting record. In a May 26, 1987 letter to a constituent, he wrote: "During my 11 years in congress, I have consistently opposed federal funding for abortions. In my opinion, it is wrong to spend federal funds for what is arguably taking of a human life." He has since changed his position entirely, a maneuver he was forced to perform in order to make himself palatable to the leftist power structure in charge of the Democratic Party.

In 1992, Gore published Earth in the Balance, an environmentalist tract with a generally apocalyptic view about the damage wrought to "the earth's climate balance." Likening the supposed abuse of the environment to the predations of Nazi Germany, Gore wrote that global warming threatens "an environmental holocaust without precedent" and, while papering over contrary evidence, insisted that "evidence of an ecological Kristalnacht is as clear as the glass shattering in Berlin. Although the book sold well, it also revealed Gore to be an uncompromising ideologue, undercutting the "moderate" image he had cultivated while seeking the presidency in 1988.

Gore's 2000 run for the Presidency was marked by revelations of his fabulation and self-creation. On one occasion, he claimed to have been the inspiration for the main character in film Love Story. He misleadingly claimed to have brought a New York toxic waste dump called Love Canal to national attention. Perhaps most notoriously, Gore in a Mach 1999 interview suggested that as a Congressman he had played a critical role in "creating  the Internet."

Since losing the 2000 presidential election, Gore has moved even farther left and become a relentless foe of the Bush administration. In recent years, his criticism has become increasingly hysterical, occasionally bordering on conspiracy theory. Thus in 2003, he  claimed President Bush was "engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate the facts in service to a totalistic ideology." Appearing at a pro-Democratic rally in February of 2004, an angry Gore ranted that President Bush had "betrayed his country" and asserted that the war against Iraq had been "pre-ordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place."

Speaking before Moveon.org activists in May  2004, Gore charged that the Bush administration's "obscene abuses of the truth…led directly to the abuses of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison," which he referred to as "Bush's Gulag." Attacking the president's domestic wiretapping program in January of 2006, Gore insisted that "the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently," urged the appointment of a special prosecutor, and supported Congressional hearings into what he called "serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the president." These speeches received generally favorable coverage from the mainstream press, but this was not the case in a February of 2006 appearance in Saudi Arabia, when Gore baselessly claimed that Arabs in the United States had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."  He was criticized even in the liberal press for making such inflammatory and demonstrably false allegations in a Muslim country in a time of war.