The War on Gore Continues

(updated)

This op-ed in the Washington Post is absolutely infuriating and is an embarrassment to the Post's editors. The piece, written by the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson, is an incredibly hackish and sloppy attempt to play 'gotcha' with Al Gore.

Ferguson points to a quote regarding the dangers of concentrated wealth that Al Gore attributes to Abraham Lincoln in his new book:

You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

Well, Andrew, I have Gore's book sitting right in front of me, and guess what: it has 273 footnotes (I guess technically endnotes) that span some 20 pages at the end of the book. In fact, the Lincoln quote on page 88 has its very own endnote, which reads:

Abraham Lincoln, "Letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864," The Lincoln Encyclopedia, ed. Archer H. Shaw (New York: MacMillan, 1950), p. 40.

Ferguson continues:

The quote is a favorite of liberal bloggers, which is probably how Gore came across it. And as a description of how many on the left see the country seven years into their Bush nightmare, it's pretty much perfect.

Too perfect, in fact. If you're familiar with Lincoln's distinctive way of expressing himself, you'll hear the false notes the passage strikes. For one thing, Lincoln just wasn't the "trembling" kind -- or if he was, he kept his trembling to himself. Words such as "enthroned" and "aggregated" are a bit too fancy for his plain, unclotted prose, and the phrase "money power" suggests a conspiratorial turn of mind that would have been foreign to him. Indeed, these words don't show up anywhere else in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln" (which, thanks to Gore's Internet, are now searchable at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/).

Ferguson goes on to explain why historians now think this quote is a fake (albeit a fake that dates back to the 1880s), and I have no reason to doubt that he's correct on this point. Nevertheless, his piece is an absolute embarrassment.

In his opening paragraph he insults Gore and his book, accuses him of not using footnotes (a blatant falsehood), and then states "I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln." Here's a novel idea: try looking in the book! It's right there: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, p. 40.

Ferguson then suggests, without any basis, that Gore probably just read the quote on some random liberal blog and threw it into is his book carelessly. He then pompously implies that anyone who really knows Lincoln would know the quote was a fake because it contained words like "aggregate," which is "a bit too fancy for [Lincoln's] plain, unclotted prose." But if you do a search for the word "aggregate" at the link Ferguson provides, you see that it shows up throughout Lincoln's works.

Most obnoxious of all, though, Ferguson resurrects an apocryphal quote of his own, making a mocking reference to "Gore's Internet." As most people are aware by now, Gore never said that he "invented the Internet." That quote was entirely made up. Where are your footnotes, Mr. Ferguson?

Apparently Al Gore (or someone who was helping him do research for his book) found a quote in The Lincoln Encyclopedia and trusted the source. The fact that the source turned out to be wrong is hardly a reflection on Gore's character or the overall quality of his book.

Meanwhile, having noticed the error, a conservative writer hastily cranks out a piece attacking Gore, but doesn't bother to get his own facts straight. How typical.

The worst part of this story, though, is the fact that this embarrassing piece made it past the editors at the Washington Post. How hard would it have been for someone to actually check Gore's book and make sure Ferguson wasn't misrepresenting its contents? It took me about four seconds. Surely someone at the Post has a copy of the book. Whoever was responsible for editing this piece needs to go.

UPDATE: Okay, I see (via Memeorandum) that I wasn't the first person to notice Ferguson's sloppiness. Ron Chusid at Liberal Values appears to have beaten me to the punch. His post is here.

UPDATE II: Jonathan Schwarz points out that while the Lincoln quote is most likely a fake, it is not, as Ferguson put it, "un-Lincolnian." He points to some real quotes that are very similar. He also has a scanned version of the endnote in Gore's book that Ferguson claimed didn't exist.