Al Gore, Our Richest Vice-President?

Cover your wallets, lock up your daughters, bury the family silver in the back yard. Al Gore is about to cool off the planet, and it won't be cheap. It's all coming together now....

Following His Green Dream Newsweek Project Green Newsweek.com

Here's the full text of the Newsweek article, along with some helpful comments....

Al Gore just won a Nobel Prize for teaching the world to think green,

as predicted here, and the Nobel wasn't for teaching the world anything. The Nobel was for Political Correctness, and was a great opportunity for the Nobel committee to embarass Bush (as if Republicans have needed help in that area....)

but he's also showing he knows a thing or two about another kind of green: money.

Ok, get the smelling salts ready. Prepare the ammonia capsules to wave under the noses of anyone who might feel faint. Children should leave the room. Move the sharp objects away from your computer. Startling revelations are on the way....

Since 2000, according to published reports, the former veep has transformed himself from a public servant with around $1 million in the bank....

Are they trying to tell us that Al Gore, who has a house with a larger carbon footprint than The Concorde, was only worth a million? ? ?

....to a sparkling private consultant with a net worth estimated to be north of $100 million.

How the heck did that happen? By growing organic vegetables and selling them at Whole Foods? Walking from city to city holding a "Will Work For Farm Subsidies" sign? By Thinking Globally, Acting Locally? There can't possibly be an earth-friendly way for Saint Albert The Goracle of Music City to be worth $100 million, can there?

He's a senior adviser to Google, a board member at Apple....

Good companies, both of them. But they aren't going to pay Saint Albert $100 million. Unless they had a massive lobbying project, and I haven't read about any, they merely wanted his picture in their newsletters. Saint Albert was probably rewarded with a favorable position in the Google Search Rankings and a free iPod Nano. (Put the words "House" "Carbon" and "Footprint" into Google and see whose residence is mentioned prominently. Tipper must be proud !)
Back to the point: Flacking for Google and Apple won't get you anywhere near $100 million.

....and now a newly minted general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that made billions investing early in Netscape, Amazon and Google.

But wait....Saint Al has a bachelor's degree in Government, doesn't he? What does he know about finance, investments, venture-capital, or even counting petty cash accurately? Shouldn't he feel guilty about accepting anything at all for lending his Government expertise to a venture-capital firm? Or was this like John Edwards making a fortune working at the Hedge Fund just to learn more about poverty and how poverty relates to the financial markets?

Gore has pledged to hand over his KP "salary" to Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit he chairs.

Thank God. I was scared he was going to spend it on a gas-guzzling SUV and some more wings for his house.

But the gift is more symbolic than material.

Symbolic money?

Gore's salary—his cut of the 2 percent "management fee" that KP partners get on all investments—is typically a sliver of the total compensation that VCs receive. If Gore's profit-sharing deal is anything like the firm's other 23 partners, he's also in line to collect tens of millions of dollars a year.

Let's assume that Saint Albert's take is exactly 20 million (the lowest possible number he could drag back to The Carbon Footprint in Nashville and still have "tens" of millions in a year.) What the hell could Albert have done for these guys that's worth TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS? (Typed in capital letters because of respect, fear, and awe.)

That's because partners carve up 30 percent of the profits if and when the alternative-energy start-ups that KP supports go public or are sold. (Kleiner Perkins declined to comment on Gore's compensation, but his communications director, Kalee Kreider, confirmed that he plans to donate only his "guaranteed income" to charity.)

Alternative-Energy Start-Ups? Do you know anything about Alternative-Energy Start-Ups? I haven't seen any Alternative-Energy Start-Ups ! ! Who needs Alternative Energy? I haven't asked for any. Wouldn't you need a really good reason to switch your home/vehicle/business to Alternative-Energy? Especially if you were a Global Warming Skeptic? Someone would have to go over your head to The Government and lobby for these Alternative-Energy startups, wouldn't they? The Government would have to make you pay for it. So who better for that dirty work than the dude who announced the "crisis" resulting from the use of Traditional Energy?

Should Gore's prospecting unearth a clean-energy gold mine the size of Google—which earned billions for KP partners—his share of the loot could make him U.S. history's richest ex-veep.

Richer than Nelson Freakin' Rockefeller? Good Lord in Heaven ! ! ! (Nelson Rockefeller, by the way, supposedly died in an extreme exercise of Traditional Energy.)

Emphasis on "ex": Gore's relationship with KP is perhaps the strongest signal yet that his days in politics are over.

Heck no, Saint Albert's days in politics aren't over. He'll be seen again, lobbying for the expensive artificial cure for the artificial crisis that he helped create. Just hide and watch. It's brilliant.

The firm is notoriously secretive about its finances, and it's unlikely that KP would strike a deal with Gore if the association could subject the firm to public scrutiny. And anyway, with the kind of money Gore stands to make, why run for president?

The only way Al Gore can make a cent off this scam is if you let him. When you see the Kleiner Perkins Start-Ups get their Government Subsidies, remember that you read about it here first. When you see Saint Albert testifying before Congress that we need to have deadlines in place for Alternative-Energy use, remember you read it here first. Look to the east, like in The Book of Revelation, and if you see Al Gore coming over the horizon on a 3-headed horse, prepare for the End Times.

Get mad. Run out into the streets and bang pots and pans together. Call your Senator, and tell him to return his Kleiner Perkins campaign contributions.

The guys who wrote the Newsweek article above, Tony Dokoupil and David A. Kaplan, wrote their entire piece without a smattering of outrage, curiosity, or skepticism. How is that possible?

(addition from 1-1-2008....I have a follow-up rant here, resulting from Gore almost getting "Person of The Year" from Time magazine. He receives similar reverent treatment from someone named Bryan Walsh. No one is wanting to question Gore's financial motives for spreading the current panic.)