The NY Times' David Brooks (hat tip: Bark Bark Woof Woof) writes of Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason:

Gore's imperviousness to reality is not the most striking feature of the book. It's the chilliness and sterility of his worldview. Gore is laying out a comprehensive theory of social development, but it allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. He sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium -- as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life. He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions.

David Brooks, professed lover of families, did not write a word about Al Gore's 2002 book, co-written with his wife Tipper, "Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family."

On pages 2-3, "Joined at the Heart" reads:

If we really care about families, we need to change our thinking about what they need, and how we as individuals, as communities, and as a society can help meet those needs. Valuing families means recognizing that families -- in all their shapes and sizes -- really are trying hard to do right by one another. Valuing families also means finding ways to nurture and support and strengthen families so that they can realize their best aspirations and provide a better future for their children.

Without strong families, we are all much more vulnerable to stress, despair, and unhappiness and their consequences. And worse still, families that malfunction and turn negatively inward can generate nearly unbearable emotional anguish. How we love, how we live, how we relate to other people, how we see ourselves — all this and so much more comes from the foundation of the families in which we grow up and the families we form ourselves. Families give our destiny its first momentum. In creating and shaping our families, each of us forms our own future. We must not take families, for granted: instead, we need to realize that for families to be able to nurture us, we need to nurture families.

Gore's new book highlights a question posed by Sen. Robert Byrd: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?"

Perhaps because "exceedingly strange individuals" like David Brooks -- who have no interest in reason, logic and truth -- can "rise to the top" as purveyors of serious political discourse.