Did you really believe that Al and Tipper Gore were full-on IN LURVE during those 40 long years of marital blissin' and kissin'? Well boy howdy, they sure got one over on you, says anew investigative opinion piece published by Eyewitness AOL.com. Hm, how did AOL News discover that the Gores were sham-married all this time?

The masterful news-scoopin' was the work of "retired USA Today White House correspondent and columnist" Richard Benedetto, who has been reporting on politics and government for about as long as the Gores have been married. This means he has literally grown old with them and knows their deepest thoughts and feelings. Also, he teaches journalism and political science at American University and Georgetown, so he has every reason to believe his research into the Gores' marriage is accurate.

Benedetto says the Gores "worked so hard to project a public image of the perfect couple in a perfect marriage," and that this was all lies, terrible lies, just like global warming and Al Gore's Internet:

[T]here were clues all along that the storybook image might not have been quite as advertised. The biggest clue was that they seemed to be overdoing it. Good marriages just are. You don't have to keep talking about how good yours is. But somehow, we fell for it anyway.

"Clues" include being too enthusiastic about how "cool" Tipper was -- not possible, given her intolerance for the 1980s metal band W.A.S.P. -- and the whole kissing thing in front of large groups of people. Also, Benedetto has no idea what Tipper ever saw in Al; therefore, they hated each other bad.

Benedetto wonders why nobody ever suspected that the Gores were pretending to love each other for so long:

It was probably because in those days [the 2000 presidential campaign] we thought it was too risky to speculate on personal stuff without evidence. Everything is different now.

That's true: now anyone can speculate freely about anything on the Internet and it might show up on Google News. This is what Al Gore intended when he invented blogs and climate change, 40 years ago. [AOLNews.com]