Guilty (14 page)

In point of fact, the historical record shows that attacks on a politician
for his marijuana use will come from the mainstream media—not the apocryphal Republican Attack Machine. In 1987, writing about the prior drug use of Reagan Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg,
New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis said, “How could a President who talks about the need for law and order pick as a Supreme Court nominee someone who illegally used marijuana when he was a law professor?”
⁹
Yes, and how much more embarrassing would it be if it were the president himself who had smoked weed? Apparently, not so much if the pothead is a Democrat.

Anthony “Reefer Madness” Lewis continued, “There is no way of escaping the fact that having on the Supreme Court someone who had violated the drug laws as an adult would be embarrassing or worse.” Or worse! Granted, Lewis knows from “embarrassing or worse,” judging from his columns. He also hooted at Reagan's claim that Ginsburg's pot-smoking was a youthful indiscretion.

What
is
the cut-off point for “youthful indiscretions”? Ginsburg was thirty-three when he smoked pot. Bill Clinton was thirty-two when Juanita Broaddrick says he raped her. Michelle Obama was forty-four when she said America is a “downright mean” country.
¹⁰
And B. Hussein Obama was twenty-six to forty-six years old during the twenty years he was an enthusiastic member of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's congregation.

The
Times
was forced to editorialize repeatedly about Ginsburg's “marijuana matter,” in order to get the balance just right between self-righteous indignation about Ginsburg on one hand and condescending contempt for antipot Puritans on the other. For a few awkward moments it almost seemed as if the
Times
was opposed to the use of illegal drugs. In a single bipolar editorial, the
Times
complained that “public pieties haven't kept up with the change of attitude” toward pot, while also huffily announcing that Ginsburg's case was “not just a marijuana disclosure but one that involved a conservative President who talks militantly against drugs and for law and order.”
¹¹
No, that wasn't a typo: The
Times
thinks it's possible to be “militantly” against crime.

Not only was the only marijuana scandal in U.S. history a creation of the media against a Republican, but the media made absolutely clear, ab initio, that they would not hold Democrats to the same standard
they hold Republicans to. As if anticipating Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Obama, an op-ed in the
Washington Post
concluded, “A Democratic president could successfully name a former marijuana smoker to the court—indeed, a Democratic president could be a former marijuana smoker. But not a Republican president.”
¹²
And to think some people say the media have a double standard! Sure enough, just five years later, the only protests about Clinton's admitted marijuana use were over his claim not to have inhaled.
¹³

So Obama had nothing to fear about his admitted drug use, least of all from Republicans. The media wanted to screw him, but only in the sense that they literally wanted to have sex with him.

It wasn't just Clinton flacks neurotically fretting about the Republican Attack Machine. No one in the establishment media had the slightest interest in the facts about Obama that might be an issue for the voters. Obama's being ranked the most liberal member of the Senate, his attack on Americans who “cling” to God and guns, his spiritual mentor being a deranged racist, his associations with felons and domestic terrorists— none of these facts bothered the media any more than they bothered the Clinton campagin. Again, the only question was whether it might occur to the Republicans to mention any of it in the general election.

On MSNBC, Dan Abrams warned, “If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, Republicans are going to attack him as too liberal.”
¹⁴
(Even that bold, out-of-nowhere prediction wasn't enough to save Abrams his anchor job.) On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin raised the fact that Obama “was one of the most liberal members of the Illinois state senate” and “if Hillary Clinton doesn't say it, you can bet the Republicans are going to say it in the fall.”
¹⁵
What else were they supposed to talk about? His big ears?

In an article titled “Insults Hit a New Low,” the
Times
of London reported that McCain, “unprompted,” had mentioned Obama's association with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. “It was a clear sign,” the article continued, “of how Republicans are going to attack the Illinois senator if he becomes the nominee.”
¹⁶
Yes, indeed. The Republicans were prepared to stoop to out-and-out truth-telling! The
Washington Post
quoted a Clinton supporter saying, “The general election is not going to be like these primaries. The Republicans are going to really attack.”
¹⁷

Writing about a Democratic debate in 2008,
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that during some of Obama's answers, “you could see white letters on a black background scrawling across the screen of a Republican attack ad.”
¹⁸
The
Times
summarized Dowd's column on the contents page: “Obama's gotta do more than get that dirt off his shoulder. Because the Republicans are going to keep it real, with attack ads and worse.”
¹⁹
What could possibly be worse than sharing documented, factually correct information with voters about the potential leader of the free world?

LIBERALS' HYSTERICAL OBSESSION WITH THE “REPUBLICAN Attack Machine” turns Democratic primaries into a contest of: “Who's the Biggest Pussy?” Although I would have voted for “All of Them,” inasmuch as none of the Democrats could face questions from Fox News's Brit Hume, the winner turned out to be Obama. Hillary claimed to be a victim of the Republicans, while Obama claimed to be a victim of Republicans, Hillary, and racists.

To make her case that she was the best candidate, Hillary said she was the biggest victim of Republicans. She got a round of applause during the South Carolina Democratic Debate, in January 2008, by saying, “If it is indeed the classic Republican campaign, I've been there. I've done that. They've been after me for sixteen years, and much to their dismay I am still here.” Brave Hillary!

Obama countered Hillary's claim that he was too scrawny to withstand the Republican Attack Machine by saying Hillary had been weakened by the Republican Attack Machine. As Obama supporter Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it, Obama “has not been worked over for years by the Republican smear machine…. Hillary carries a legacy of the Republican attack machine that took her and President Clinton on for a decade, really, with billions of dollars behind them—well, hundreds of millions anyway—and so it's a different thing.”
²⁰
This makes me very angry: If the fantasy Republican Attack Machine has billions, or at least hundreds of millions of dollars, where's my check?

Obama claimed to be a victim of Republicans, too. Blubbering on
60 Minutes
about the coming Republican attacks, he said, “The Republicans
are going to come after me. There's no doubt that there will be attempts on the part of the Republican Party to demonize me in the general election.”
²¹

Both Hillary and Obama accused each other of adopting the smear techniques of the Republicans. Hillary said Obama was using tactics “right out of Karl Rove's playbook”
²²
—an incongruous complaint from a candidate who boasted of her ability to withstand Republican attacks. Obama's team had the same complaint with Hillary—that she was as bad as the Republicans. When superdelegate and Indiana native Joe Andrew switched his allegiance from Hillary to Obama days before the Indiana primary, Evan Bayh, senator from Indiana and Clinton delegate, commented, “I don't think he's lived in our state for eight or nine years. I don't think he can even vote in Indiana.”

This brutal attack was too much for Andrew, who went on MSNBC's
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
to complain, “What you're hearing now is the exact kind of language that came out from Republicans when I was defending Bill Clinton during the impeachment of the president.”
²³

This was surprising to me, because if anyone was part of any Republican Attack Machine during Clinton's impeachment, I think I was, and yet I had never heard of Joe Andrew. Indeed, Keith Olbermann pompously introduced Andrew as “the most influential politician you probably had never heard of—which is a big compliment coming from a TV show host most Americans have never heard of. Maybe when Andrew said Hillary's people were using “the exact kind of language that came out from Republicans,” he meant English.

A search of Joe Andrew on Nexis turns up innumerable mentions of Andrew, who was the chair of the Democratic Party in 1999, reciting bland Democratic talking points, but there wasn't a lot of criticism from the Republican Attack Machine, perhaps because it can only attack objects large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Still, if Andrew says he was a victim of Republican attacks, then he must have been. So I tried searching Andrew's name near words like “lie” or “liar” or “lying” and finally got a hit: It was Andrew accusing his Republican counterpart of “lying on national television” for implying that Hillary knew what Bill was doing with Monica
Lewinsky. To this, Andrew responded, “Look, if you're going to lie on national television, at least you ought to be called on it occasionally.”
²⁴

Joe Andrew: victim of the Republican Attack Machine.

While pretending to be bravely facing down an Attack Machine, in fact, Andrew was capitulating to an Attack Machine: the media. The mainstream media switched their allegiance from the Clintons to Obama, so Andrew did, too. Surely no one noticed the about-face more than the Clintons themselves.

For years, the media took a sadistic pleasure in reporting that Bill Clinton, a sociopathic sex offender and bully with a narcissistic disorder, was wildly popular. The media simply asserted that Clinton was beloved across the land—despite never being able to get 50 percent of the country to vote for him, even before the country knew about Monica Lewinsky. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who worked for Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, and was paid not to lie to his client, explained to
Vanity Fair
magazine that Clinton was banished from Gore's 2000 presidential campaign because research showed that whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore's numbers plummeted. Greenberg said that if polls showed Clinton would have helped, he would have “had Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back.” Mind you, this was when one man could still actually carry Al Gore on his back.

But the mainstream media wouldn't quit. No matter how preposterous it was, liberals just kept telling us that the chubby kid with the big red nose whose greatest moment on the football field involved a wind instrument was “Elvis.” According to Nexis, that appellation has been applied to Clinton approximately 1,000 times. In print, that is. There's no telling how many drunken cocktail waitresses have whispered it in Clinton's ear during late-night elevator assignations.

As late as 2006, Clinton could expect an exchange like this with Meredith Vieira on
The Today Show:

But then Obama emerged from the clouds, and at long last, liberals were finished with the Clintons—which was as close to actual mainstream thinking as they'D been in years. Worst of all, the media turned on Clinton using the nastiest trick of the Republican Attack Machine: They told the truth about him.

If you've ever wondered how a Democrat would fare being treated like a Republican by the media, you'll still have to wait to see it. But at least liberals stopped aggressively lying for the Clintons. It took a decade, but journalists finally noticed that Clinton getting serviced by a White House intern whose name he couldn't recall may not have been the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. “Bill's affair with Monica Lewinsky,” liberal columnist Jonathan Chait wrote in the
Los Angeles Times,
“jeopardized the whole progressive project for momentary pleasure.”
²⁶
Chait also mentioned the Clintons' “lying and sleaze-mongering”—while still denouncing “frothing Clinton haters.”

Having finally noticed the blindingly obvious, Chait asked, “Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along?” He idiotically added, “Maybe not right to set up a perjury trap so they could impeach him, but right about the Clintons' essential nature?” Um. It wasn't a “trap.” It was a “question.” Try sending a bimbo with a thong into the Oval Office of any Republican president and feel free to ask him any questions about it later, under oath. President Bush would have probably taken the strumpet to church with him. This is where the “essential nature” issue comes in.

In a July 2008
Vanity Fair
article about Bill Clinton by Todd Pur-dum, husband of Clinton's former press secretary Dee Dee Myers, consumers of the mainstream media would read for the first time about Clinton's “cavernous narcissism,” his “blowups at television reporters,” his cheating at golf, his “maladroit” campaigning for his wife,
and his “repellent grandiosity.”
²⁷
Purdum stoutly stuck by the old lie, claiming that—until that very year!—Clinton “was among the most popular figures on the planet,” which, assuming he was referring to the planet Earth, was preposterous. Demonstrating the irresistible charm for which he was famous, Clinton responded to the article by calling Purdum “sleazy,” “dishonest,” “slimy,” and a “scumbag.”