Arianna Huffington: Interviewing Gore: On the Pollution of Our Environment, Our Politics, and Our Souls

Well-armed with all your great questions, I interviewed Al Gore over the weekend. After talking with him and reading his book, The Assault on Reason (which will debut at #1 in the New York Times on Sunday), it was clear that he is obsessed with two kinds of pollution -- the pollution of our planet, and the pollution of our politics and culture. In other words, the toxicity of the atmosphere and the toxicity of the public sphere.

While I completely agree with his passionate warnings about the dangers from these two pollutions, I believe there is a third: the pollution of our leaders' brains and hearts and souls that affects their spines when they know what is true, right, and in the best interests of the country but fail to stand up for it. After all, leadership has always been about seeing clearly while most around you have their vision clouded by the cultural toxicity Gore rails against.

"It's a problem that George Bush invaded Iraq," Gore told me. "It's a problem that he authorized warrantless mass eavesdropping on American citizens. It's a problem that he lifted the prohibition against torture. It's a problem that he censored hundreds of scientific reports on the climate crisis -- but it's a bigger problem that we've been so vulnerable to such crass manipulation and that there has been so little outcry or protest as American values have been discarded, one after another. And if we pretend that the magic solution for all these problems is simply to put a different person in the office of the president without attending to the cracks in the foundation of our democracy, then the same weaknesses that have been exploited by this White House will be exploited by others in the future."

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