Take Back Al Gore's Oscar

No, it wouldn't do anything for the environment. But two Hollywood conservatives (yes, there are some) have called upon the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to rescind the prestigious, profitable gold Oscar statuette that it gave ex-Vice President Al Gore et al two years ago for the environmental movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd, both Academy members, are among a small, meandering pack of known political conservatives still believed to be on the loose in the liberal bastion of movie-making. In 2007, Hollywood's Academy sanctified Gore's cinematic message of global warming with its famous statue, enriched his earnings by $100,000 per 85-minute appearance and helped elevate the Tennesseean's profile to win the Nobel Peace Prize despite losing the election battle of 2000 to a Texan and living in a large house with lots of energy-driven appliances. Chetwynd and Simon were prompted to make their hopeless demand this week by the leak two weeks ago of a blizzard of British academic e-mails purporting to show that scientists at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit systematically falsified data to document the appearance of global warming in recent years. The university is reportedly investigating the claims, which added dry fuel to the never-ending political debate over whether the Earth really is warming as a result of human activity or if it's just normal natural cycles and the debate is what's heated. The demand to withdraw Gore's award provides yet another opportunity to argue. The startling leak comes at an inconvenient time just before next week's United Nations' climate change meeting that will cause an immense carbon footprint with thousands of people flying up or over to Denmark to talk about saving the environment. These airplanes will include Air Force One with its primary passenger President Obama, who's returning to the Copenhagen scene where he didn't help win the 2016 Summer Olympics for Chicago, which could do with a little global warming at this time of year.Simon, a screenwriter who is also chief executive officer of Pajamas Media, a network of conservative online blogs, conceded he knew of no precedent for the Academy withdrawing a previously-awarded Oscar, despite decades of Hollywood hijinks and worse. But, he added, "I think they should rescind this one." The controversial leaked documents have been assembled here by Pajamas Media and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The joint demand by Simon and filmmaker Chetwynd is available on video here. The television news-watching world in America has not learned much about the so-called Climategate scandal because it has not really been mentioned on the air except for a notorious cable news channel named for a three-lettered, wily, wild animal that often seems to revel in debunking liberal shibboleths. Network news programs have been far more concerned with the obviously more important White House party-crasher story involving a couple of formally-dressed phonies. The falsified documents do not come up in Gore interview excerpts published late last night here by Politico's John F. Harris and Mike Allen. This week White House Press Secy. Robert Gibbs claimed that global warming was no longer in dispute by most people. But a subsequent Rasmussen Reports poll of Americans finds only one in four adults believe most scientists agree on the topic. And while only 20% claim to have followed the leaked e-mail story Very Closely, nearly 60% believe it is at least somewhat likely that scientists have falsified environmental data to support their own global warming beliefs and theories.