It seemed like ESPN and the Cartoon Network were the only channels you could flip to last Friday to avoid the euphoria. Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize win had just been announced, and all the newscasts highlighted the award’s importance by running new packages on global warming, now marketed as climate change.

And every witless news anchor from Fox News to CNN began their scripted speculations of whether Gore would run for president on the strength of such a great honor.

One major question was left unasked by most mainstream media voices: Namely, how great of an honor can it be if a gangster-terrorist like Yasser Arafat can win it?

Gore, of course, won’t run this time. It’s possible that he really does see his environmental crusade as a more important, or righteous, role. It’s also possible that Gore is making the same long-term play that Newt Gingrich seems to have chosen.

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Step 1: Let the 2008 winner spend a term or two contending with the problems of Iraq and Iran. Step 2: Keep playing the media-friendly role of elder statesman in the meantime. Step 3: Try to win a presidency where one’s political capital can be expended on less disagreeable matters.

No one who saw Gore browbeating Frank Zappa over naughty words on rock and rap records would have believed Gore could be a political folk hero. But he is.

And what does it say about our political culture when an arrogant environmentalist — who steadfastly claims he is completely right even when others poke holes in his arguments — can achieve such status?

The latest example comes from a British court asked to decide whether “An Inconvenient Truth” should be shown in every secondary school.

While High Court Judge Michael Burton believed the film was “broadly accurate,” he found in it at least nine significant falsehoods. Among them were the cinematic assertions that man-made global warming would raise sea levels more than 20 feet in the near future and that it caused Hurricane Katrina.

Gore also falsely claimed that global warming is causing the snows of the Kilimanjaro to melt, Lake Chad to evaporate and polar bears to drown, Burton ruled.

Because of such errors, Gore’s lecture “is not simply a science film,” but a political one, Burton said.

That’s no surprise in light of Gore’s fundamentally unscientific attitude toward the topic. He persists with the claim that every proper scientist agrees with him, and that those who don’t are not proper scientists.

Why does anyone trust a man who, in the name of science, tells others not to bother looking for the truth independently?

One reason has to be the desire to belong to a cause greater than one’s self. Another is the fact that we’re told over and over to do our part for a clean environment, and we modern-day Americans are generally obedient.

Neither of those reasons would have been acceptable to the subject of Christopher Hitchens’ smart little book, “Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.”

As a prophet of both the American and French revolutions, Paine wrote and worked bravely for the advancement of political ideals that honored individual rights as more important than tradition, posterity or the desires of a current majority.

For Gore, the planet’s health should be mankind’s greatest priority. For Paine, the liberty and dignity of each and every person was the most important thing in the world.

Yet while Paine died alone and in relative obscurity, Gore’s stock in Google and Apple has made him extremely wealthy.

One hopes history will see the two men more clearly than their contemporaries.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.