Look For The Braggart Label

Damian Thompson in today's Telegraph discusses Al Gore's Nobel win. As he points out, it will just be one more thing to swell the head of a habitual braggart and serial exaggerator. It will be an opportunity for Gore to exponentially increase his already gargantuan carbon footprint. Thompson enumerates some of his favorite Gorexaggerations.

He never claimed to have invented the internet; he said he "took the initiative in creating the internet", which is about a quarter true - he was among the first congressmen to support the invention.

In 1999, he boasted about having uncovered the most famous toxic waste site in America ("I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal"). Yes, but Love Canal was already notorious by the time Gore "found" it.

That's typical of his arrogance, says the non-partisan US politics website Skeleton Closet: "When he says the words 'little place', you can feel him struggling to contain his pleasure with his good deeds."

Gore struggles with his memory, too. "I certainly learnt a lot from 3,000 town hall meetings across …Tennessee over a 16-year period," he told National Public Radio. And so he would have, had he actually attended 187 town hall meetings a year, which is what it works out as: he might even have managed to hold his home state in 2000.

But my favourite Gore memory lapse is his account of being sung to sleep with the lullaby Look for the Union Label, written in 1975. How sweet: being sung to sleep by your parents at the age of 27.

Then there's his evasiveness on the subject of alleged ethical violations. He resorts to "legalisms", says Skeleton Closet: although he might technically be in the right, "he has such a tin ear for the way normal people talk that he sounds like a mafia don".

Read it all, it's pretty brutal.