UPDATE: Ann Althouse has a new slogan for Al Jazeera, “You can call us Al.”

Bernard Goldberg on Al Gore selling his TV channel:

…Because Current was such a financial flop, Gore and his business partners decided to sell. (These are the same geniuses, by the way, who once paid Keith Olbermann $10 million dollars and got nothing but trouble in return.) But they wanted a very special buyer, one who shared their values, they said.

Turns out Glenn Beck wanted to buy Current but no way Gore and his team would ever let that happen. They refused to take an offer from Beck because, as one source put it, “the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view.”

Instead, they sold out to al Jazeera. Seriously.

If you think that’s funny wait until you hear the rest of the story. The government of Qatar owns al Jazeera (which claims to be independent from the government). Qatar makes about a bazillion dollars a week selling oil to the gas-guzzling world. So if you connect the dots you can easily see that money derived from oil bought Current TV – from the same Al Gore who has spent the past decade or so railing against oil, unless it’s being pumped into the private jet which hauls his considerable rear end all over the place.

Can you say irony? But wait. Don’t say it yet.

It also turns out that Gore – whose picture you see if you look up the word “liberal” in the dictionary — wanted to close the deal before December 31. Why? Because he reportedly is making about $100 million on the sale and … (wait for it) … wanted to avoid the higher tax rates on people like him that went into effect on January 1 of this year. (He missed by a day; the deal wasn’t done until January 2nd.)

Don’t you love those sanctimonious liberals who tell us the rich need to pay their “fair share,” that raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans is the patriotic thing to do … and then do their best to make sure they themselves don’t actually have to pay higher taxes.

Gore may have sold the Arabs a bag of sand.

Just buying Current does not guarantee instant distribution, however. Time Warner Cable, which offered Current in roughly 10 million of its homes, is dropping the channel. Without Time Warner Cable, which is the largest distributor in New York City and Los Angeles, Current TV is in only about 50 million homes.

Typically, when a cable network is sold or changes its programming direction, distributors can renegotiate their deals. It is possible that other distributors that carry Current may see the sale as an opportunity to drop a low-rated channel that is fairly expensive in proportion to its ratings.

But here’s the corker:

Gore and Hyatt said in a statement that Current and Al Jazeera shared similar goals of speaking “truth to power” and providing “independent and diverse points of view and to “tell the stories that no one else is telling.”

Gore’s propaganda film–which won an Oscar and him a Nobel prize–pretends that the green lobby is outnumbered and outspent by evil capitalists. This is just another lie.