Guilty (26 page)

You know when Teddy Kennedy's divorce records would have been really interesting? In 1994, when he faced Mitt Romney in a tough battle for the U.S. Senate. During that very campaign, Joan Kennedy filed sealed papers to reopen her divorce from Ted.
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That would have set reporters' hair on fire if Kennedy were a Republican.
Filing in a Boston courthouse, Mrs. Kennedy specifically stated that their divorce papers had been originally filed in Hyannisport simply to avoid “public scrutiny and publicity,” because “Mr. Kennedy was fearful the press would learn of the divorce and the provisions of our separation agreement, which incorporated our financial settlement.”
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Hello? Watchdog media? Anything “interesting” there? Or were you still trying to reinterview the same three people claiming that Newt Gingrich was a beast to his first wife?

In September 1994, Romney led Kennedy 43 percent to 42 percent in polls.
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But on election day, Kennedy clobbered Romney 58 percent to 42 percent. What happened in the interim?

In innumerable newspaper articles and TV reports, Romney was portrayed as an uncaring robber baron who had laid off hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of hardworking blue-collar workers. The specific charge involved a strike at a paper plant in Indiana that had been acquired by a company named Ampad, which in turn was owned by the company Romney founded, Bain Capital. As was later admitted in the
Boston Globe
—after the election—Romney had absolutely nothing to do with the Indiana paper mill even using the crazy corporate-connection logic of liberals. Ampad bought the Indiana paper plant six months
after
Romney had left Bain. To put this in perspective, it would be like blaming a guy who sold Kennedy a car six months before July 19, 1969, for Mary Jo Kopechne's death.

But as the
Globe
would ruefully remark after the damage was done, “politics is about emotion, not logic.”
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Who creates that emotion? Could it have anything to do with the 8 billion news stories the
Globe
ran smearing Romney as a ruthless corporate raider?

The first of the literally two dozen stories in the
Globe
pursuing the story of “Mitt Romney: Robber Baron” featured heartrending tidbits like these:

A union official said the paper company's problems “are evidence that Romney is insensitive to workers.”
Then the union official got back into a Lincoln town car and had his driver take him back to his country estate.

The union official added that “Romney is just another robber baron.”
You'D think Romney had amassed a great family fortune through unscrupulous business ventures, like bootlegging liquor during Prohibition.

He added that Romney's firm “destroyed 10 jobs for every job they have allegedly created”—
whereas the union rarely destroyed more than 5 jobs for each job it created.

Among those laid off at the paper plant “were two pregnant women.”
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By contrast, Kennedy was so compassionate he would have immediately offered both women free abortions.

In its postelection analysis, the
Globe
said the Kennedy campaign had cleverly coordinated with union officials to concoct a major media scandal out of a strike at a paper plant acquired by a company that was bought by a private equity firm six months after Romney left the private equity firm. The
Globe
acted as if it were merely an unwitting accomplice in this ridiculous slander.

WHILE THE MEDIA WERE UNABLE TO STOP THEMSELVES FROM spreading unsubstantiated rumors about Romney's business, they were an impenetrable firewall for rumors swirling around presidential candidate John Edwards in 2007.

During the 2008 Democratic primaries, it was generally assumed that John Edwards's presence hurt Hillary more than it hurt Obama, by peeling off some of her blue-collar voters. The same mainstream media that were mad to produce Jack Ryan's sealed divorce records when he was running for the Senate obstinately refused to report on Edwards's extramarital affair. Perhaps they were still working on that Chap-paquiddick exposé that hadn't been ready for publication for forty years.

In 2007, the
National Enquirer
began reporting on Edwards's affair with New Age divorcée Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck. The establishment media completely ignored the story and Edwards continued with his campaign for president. Even when the
Enquirer
reported that Hunter was pregnant with Edwards's love child, the media ignored the story.

The Edwards campaign denied the affair, pawning it off on an apparently very loyal Edwards campaign official, Andrew Young. Like Edwards, Young was married with children, but also like Edwards, Young was a Democrat, so it was possible. Except that, not only did Young's wife not leave him, she was perfectly agreeable to having her husband's mistress move into their gated community for the duration of the pregnancy, and even join her, Andrew, and the kids for dinner. This did not pique the media's interest.

The campaign videos Hunter had been hired to make for Edwards were stripped from the campaign website. The mainstream media remained uninterested.

Finally, in the summer of 2008, the
Enquirer,
still the lone news outlet covering the affair, staked out the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles after receiving a tip that Edwards would be there to visit Hunter and the love child, who reportedly has her mother's eyes and her father's dramatic flair in front of a jury. Edwards fled from the reporters and blockaded himself in a hotel bathroom until hotel security came to rescue him. Even more suspicious, while Edwards was barricaded in the bathroom, no one reported hearing sounds of a blow dryer. If only Republican Larry Craig had been in that bathroom, NBC might have covered it!

A memo from an
L.A. Times
editor to his bloggers was leaked to
Slate
blogger Mickey Kaus soon after the
Enquirer's
hotel stakeout, firmly instructing the
Times's
bloggers not to mention the brewing Edwards scandal. This would suggest that there was some interest in the topic. The memo said:

A
Washington Post
reporter defended the total media blackout on the story, telling the
Times
of London, “Edwards is no longer an elected official and he is not running for office now. Don't expect wall-to-wall coverage.”
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But Edwards wasn't some no-name congressman: He was the Democrats' most recent vice presidential candidate, he had been a candidate for president just months earlier, and he was being talked about for cabinet positions in any Democratic administration.

Say, what sort of “elected official” was Ted Haggard again? He was the Christian minister no one outside of his own parish had ever heard of until he was caught in a gay sex scandal the previous year. Then he suddenly became the Pope of the Protestants. And yet, despite the fact that Haggard was not an “elected official,” the
Post
gave that story wall-to-wall coverage. And what office was Bill Bennett running for when he was caught gambling in Las Vegas? What office was Rush Limbaugh running for when the media was saturated with coverage of his unused bottle of Viagra?

The non-American press was not so demure about the Edwards scandal. Here is a sampling of some of the foreign headlines within a couple of weeks of the
National Enquirer
bathroom stakeout: “Sleaze Scuppers Democrat Golden Boy”
(Sunday Times
—London), “Scandal Sinks Edwards's VP Hopes”
(The Australian),
“VP Dreams End in Rielle Nightmare”
(Sunday Independent
—Ireland), “The ‘Scoop' the US Papers Ignored” (British
Independent Media Weekly
—Britain), “Edwards' ‘Love Child' Silence Fuels the Gossip Mills”
(Toronto Star),
“It's Enough to Make You Veep Down a Rich US Path”
(Canberra Times—
Australia). There was also this evocative line from an article in
the Canadian
Hamilton Spectator:
“I was sweating like John Edwards looking at the
National Enquirer.”

Why do liberals always want us to be more like foreigners when it comes to “tolerating” the sex scandals of Democrats, but not when it comes to reporting sex scandals of Democrats? To paraphrase Michelle Obama, after reading those foreign headlines, for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm proud to be a European American!

Isn't there some level of coverage between “wall-to-wall” and “double-secret probation, delta-force level total news blackout” when it comes to a sex scandal involving a Democrat?

Apparently not. The only way consumers of the establishment media might have ascertained that Edwards was embroiled in some sort of scandal was that, after the incident in the hotel, his name was summarily dropped from discussions of possible vice presidential candidates. The Democrats' most recent vice presidential candidate was suddenly getting less coverage than Ron Paul. It was reminiscent of the Soviet press. His name had simply been completely whitewashed out of the news.
Say, why isn't anyone talking about John Edwards for vice president anymore? No, seriously— Hey! Why are we going to a commercial break?

It was not until Edwards himself confessed to the affair that the media had dispensation to report the story. Edwards copped to the sexual relationship, but said the child he was visiting in the hotel wasn't his, and he also gallantly added that he had never loved his mistress anyway. He said he was being “99 percent honest” when he had denied the affair. Apparently if you simply removed the words “not” and “false” from his denials—which is about 1 percent of what he said— the rest was true. He also boasted that he only cheated on his wife when the cancer was in remission—I guess by regularly checking her red blood cell count. I wish I had a nickel for every time a married guy in a bar said to me, “My wife just doesn't understand me—and her cancer is in remission!” Needless to say, the love child landed Edwards in hot water with the feminists, who were hopping mad that Hunter had decided not to abort the baby.