Perhaps the most candid confession of putting naked self-interest above the lives of millions of people was made by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s. Like other western leaders, Baldwin knew early on that Hitler was rearming Germany, in preparation for unleashing another war. But, like those other leaders in Britain, France and elsewhere, Baldwin also knew that the public was still so horrified by the catastrophe of the First World War that they did not want to hear about any need to rearm in order to deter Hitler or defend against him.
In Baldwin's own words: "Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming, and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain."
In other words, it was more important for Stanley Baldwin to be re-elected than to protect the lives of the millions of people who were looking to him for leadership. Many British fighting men around the world -- and many Americans -- lost their lives in the early years of World War II, when they were using obsolete equipment, because it had not been politically expedient in democratic nations during the 1930s to update and expand their military equipment.
As for Al Gore's "caring," the phoniness of this has been demonstrated too many times already for this to be taken seriously by people who are not suffering from amnesia. This is a man whose tiny charitable contributions from his own income contrasted sharply from his willingness to throw billions or trillions of dollars of the taxpayers' money at all sorts of problems. This is the slum landlord who let his tenants' broken toilet go unfixed for months.
This is the man -- but do the facts matter? Or is image all?