The Gore obsession.

Putz's loopy crusade against Al Gore gets more and more unhinged every day. His recent anti-Gore campaign began right after the Oscars with a link promoting the bogus right wing front organization, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, which was lying in wait to smear Gore after his win.

Last week, he sided with warming denialist nutbar James Inhofe against Gore, though even the National Review winced at Inhofe's attacks. And today, like a junkie looking for a cheap fix, he links to Pajamas partisan and reliable Gore-hater Roger L. Simon. The same Simon who laughably predicted in November that cold weather would hurt Gore's Oscar chances.

But the most pathetic spectacle of all is the odd, robotic repetition of the "Gore is a hypocrite moralizer" language Putz keeps chanting like a mantra.

That may be too strong, but they don't sit well with moralistic messianic crusading.

But it's one that Gore has opened himself up to. That's the problem with moralistic, messianic crusading -- people expect you to live up to it.

But this will add to the perception that Gore's green talk is hypocritical, I suspect. As I've noted below, if you adopt a quasi-messianic posture, people will judge your actions very differently than if you do not.

But this illustrates a problem with the environmental movement -- when you push your ideas not as a pragmatic, technocratic approach, but instead sell it as a messianic moralistic quasi-religious one, then things like this do look hypocritical.

That moralistic approach is also why Gore got slammed so much for hypocrisy. Carbon offsets (to the -- unclear -- extent that they're non-fake) are a practical, rationalistic, capitalistic approach to a problem that has been defined in romantic, moralistic, apocalyptic terms.

Moralists are especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy -- ask any backsliding fundamentalist preacher. If Gore were less moralistic in his approach -- as he gains weight, he's even starting to look a bit like a younger Jerry Falwell -- the charges of hypocrisy would have less bite.

I can't figure out why the nonpartisan who previously wrote that charges of hypocrisy were bogus is so fixated on Gore's supposed hypocrisy. I'm tempted to believe that he's worried about a Gore candidacy, but this looks more and more like just a personal vendetta.