Sebastian Mallaby wrote an excellent column, but I have two objections. Mallaby makes his point concisely
"By their serial dishonesty, Republicans have created a market for "An Inconvenient Truth" -- the title of Gore's movie." He also says the movie (which I haven't seen) is very boring.

I object to two claims in the last paragraph

Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting.

Nice guys can screw up, but George Bush is not a nice guy, although he may be a pleasant fellow. Niceness isn't just smiles and jokes. It also implies genuine kindness and decency underneath. Bush has the intellect of Reagan and the decency of Nixon.

Also, of course, he didn't win the election, or at least he didn't win it by convincing Americans who are not supreme court justices. I don't want to go back to that, but Mallaby should have added "in the electoral college" after "defeated Gore." Gore won the popular vote. This is an uncontested fact (a kind of fact which as Mallaby notes has gotten rare lately). That's all in the past and isn't worth much more than 2 words of 70, but, come on Sebastian, two words for 500,000 votes is stingy enough.

Mallaby doesn't say anything about Mallaby, but Margaret Carlson seems to be offering to drink a beer with Gore as penance. She also has the right word "likeable" not "nice." The dread thing which reminds me I better not even try to give advice to politicians (not that any are reading this blog) is that I would much rather have a beer with someone like Gore than with someone like Bush totally aside from the horrors of Bush the politician. I'd rather talk about global warming than whatever Bush chats about, and, I swear, I am lazier than George W Bush.

Bit embarassed about forgetting the word likeable. Over here we say "simpatico" and I have lost touch with my native language (although does anyone anywhere know how to say "outsourcing" in Italian Giovanni Vecchi says "apalto" which is, I'm afraid, correct but sounds like public contracting (as in is the word which comes before bribe in the Italian political dictionary). Of course, all Italians say "outsourcing." Come on NSA guys give me a hand here.