Who can't get over Al Gore?

This is funny. Both Mariel and Paul Krugman think that conservatives “can’t get over” Al Gore. Yes, you read that right.

Countless liberals around the world swoon at Gore’s rock concerts. They buy his books and go to his movies in droves. They shower him with awards. They achingly pine for his return to presidential politics. They make excuses for his hypocrisy, winking at his embarrassingly massive, environmentally unfriendly mansion and his preference for private jets over commercial airlines. They ignore his tendency toward exaggeration. They even make silly, exaggerated comments of their own, calling him things like “the man who saved the world.” And they lash out angrily at anyone who dares to say a less than fawning word about their hero.

But it’s conservatives who “can’t get over” the man.

Um, sure.

The evidence for this is that after years of liberals’ publicly heralding Gore as their secular messiah — culminating in the media frenzy over his winning the Nobel Prize, the likes of which few if any other winners have ever received — some conservatives had the gall to ask: Isn’t this all a little over the top?

Funnier still, Mariel and Krugman think conservatives object to the Gore worship because we haven’t gotten over the election of 2000.

Right.

Sundry liberals have spent the last seven years taking every opportunity they can find to utter phrases like “selected not elected,” “Gore won the popular vote” and “next time he wins.”

But it’s conservatives who can’t get over election 2000. I get it. (This is what's known as "projection.")

And funniest of all, Mariel and Krugman think the real reason people like me supposedly hate Gore is because we know he’d be unstoppable if he got into the 2008 race. Even though his poll numbers have been falling even among Democrats. (I, for one, consider Hillary Clinton a far more formidable Democratic candidate than the man who, despite being in the incumbent party during a time of peace and prosperity, couldn’t carry his own home state. And, for the record, I fear a Giuliani presidency even more.)

Look, I don’t hate Al Gore. In a world with the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there are people far more worthy of the opprobrium. Nor have I ever been a climate-change “denier.” But I’m not so blinded by devotion to the man that I fail to recognize his excesses or even his humanity (or his unfitness for a Nobel Peace Prize). And looking askance at the irrational infatuation too many have with him doesn’t make me the one who "can't get over" him. (BTW, I'm not the one who brought this issue up a week after it had died.)

Trust me, I got over Gore -- a long, long time ago.