Gore Skinned Mules, Slopped
Hogs While Inventing Internet

DES MOINES, Iowa — Vice President Al Gore is truly a legend in his own mind, a Renaissance man without peer. Launching his Year 2000 presidential bid in Iowa this week, the Washington-reared son of a wealthy and powerful U.S. senator sold himself to audiences as a gin-u-wine sodbustin' pioneer.

According to the Associated Press, Gore regaled listeners with tales of plowing "a steep hillside" with mules, slopping hogs, and baling hay "all day long in the hot sun."

And as if that wasn't country enough for the Midwest bumpkins, he claimed he'd also built homes and cleared land by hand — with a double-bitted axe!

This, of course, was during his Daniel Boone phase, before he and his wife inspired the romantic novel and movie "Love Story," and he went on to invent the Internet.

Al Gore, it seems, has done it all, at least to hear him tell it.

It was just last week that Gore staked his claim to the Internet, telling a worldwide audience on CNN that he had invented it. The Net's real developers, who began connecting far-flung computers years before Gore ever got his hands on one, were presumably not amused. One, however, did credit Gore with talking a lot about the Internet.

The "Love Story" claim goes back a year or more and received little press at the time. In that incident, Gore claimed he and wife Tipper were the inspirations for Erich Segal's book and the resulting 1970s hit movie. It apparently didn't occur to Gore that the pivotal moment in the story came when one of the two lovebirds died. To make matters more embarrassing — at least for most people — author Segal himself disputes Gore's claim.

But Gore's whoppers don't appear to embarrass him the way they would most anyone else.

During the 1996 campaign, he scored a major hit with fellow Democrats during the party convention with his tearful story about his sister's death from cancer and how it had inspired him to launch an anti-smoking crusade. The problem with that story was that well after his sister's death, Gore had shamelessly stumped tobacco country, seeking votes and campaign contributions by portraying himself as a tobacco farmer.

Then there was his 1988 presidential campaign, which featured Gore in brochures and television commercials as a Vietnam combat veteran. Oops — Gore actually served only five months in-country, and then as a non-combat military public relations officer.