Guilty (27 page)

Edwards had no explanation for why his national finance chair, Texas trial lawyer Fred Baron, was paying his mistress—allegedly about $15,000 a month—and was also paying Andrew Young, the Edwards aide who bravely claimed to be the father of the love child. Finally, Edwards said the affair was over before he announced he was running for president, but that claim collapsed almost immediately, after photos were released showing Edwards and Hunter together after he had announced. For his next story, I recommend: Yes, the child is mine—but she looks nothing like me.

Forced by Edwards's admission to report this blockbuster story, the establishment media decided to cover it on … the opening night of the Olympics. That seemed really weird, because for weeks the media had been talking about how no one would be paying attention to politics during the Olympics. On CNN, John King said the Olympic Games were “expected to push politics off the center stage for most of August.” The Associated Press referred to “the August summertime lull when attention is focused not on politics but on the Olympics.” And an article in the
Wall Street Journal
said, “With the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics just days away and hordes of voters on vacation, the American public's attention span for politics is minimal at best.”

If you were paranoid about media bias, you might think that the networks got together to figure out how to report the Edwards story so that it would have the least conceivable impact. Through months of increasingly dramatic coverage in the
Enquirer,
the mainstream media had played Soviet Commissars, refusing to mention Edwards's shocking sex scandal. And then the media waited until the opening night of the Olympics to finally break the story. Evidently, ABC got the short straw, and it had to broadcast Edwards's admission. As planned, the Edwards interview got abominable ratings. In two years, liberals will be boasting about ABC's airing of Edwards's confession—forgetting to mention it was on the opening night of the Olympics—as proof that there is no liberal media bias.

Say, do you think the
Enquirer's
“love child” story would have attracted media attention if it had involved Mitt Romney? His presidential campaign ended one week after Edwards's did. But I'm fairly certain the press would be able to manufacture an all-new rule to justify nonstop
coverage of any lurid sex scandal in Romney's life. They'D bring Ted Koppel out of retirement to cover that. Katie Couric, Brian Williams, and Charles Gibson would be anchoring the evening news from Romney's front yard. They might even get Dan Rather to produce some forged documents for the occasion! But with a Democratic sex scandal, major media outlets compete for the Pulitzer for Best Suppressed Story.

The media never display skittishness about purported sex scandals involving Republicans. In 1992, when President George H. W. Bush was running against the draft-dodging, pot-smoking horny hick from Arkansas, the establishment media gamely produced a long-ago-disproved charge that Bush had had an affair with an aide named Jennifer Fitzgerald. The rumor had been hotly pursued in the 1980s by a variety of news organizations, but they all came up dry. Ann Devroy, who was working for the
Washington Post
when the affair rumor first surfaced, said, “I spent two solid months looking into this in the early 1980s and I never found any evidence of it.”
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But in the middle of the 1992 presidential campaign, with a well-known philanderer running for president on the Democratic ticket, the very same mainstream media that was busy sneering at Gennifer Flow-ers's claim that she had had a long-term affair with Clinton—backed up with tape-recorded telephone conversations—suddenly was hot on the trail of Bush's already-disproved “affair.”

The only “evidence” was a quote from former ambassador Louis Fields that came out in a book published that year, although Fields had died six years earlier. Fields allegedly claimed he had arranged for Bush and the putative mistress Fitzgerald to use his guesthouse when they were traveling on official business. One of the dead man's “corroborating witnesses” confirmed that Fields said they had used the guesthouse, but denied that Fields had ever suspected they were having an affair.
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Nonetheless, the Democrats blast-faxed this tidbit from the book to a compliant media.

The resurrected, but still unsubstantiated, rumor was published in thousands of news reports during the campaign, including major frontpage coverage in the
Baltimore Sun, USA Today,
the
New York Post,
the
New York Daily News,
and the
Boston Herald,
and a full-page story in
the
Philadephia Daily News.
New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller wrote in the
Baltimore Sun,
“The press is obliged to pursue the story because of the way it pursued Clinton. To do otherwise would be unfair.”
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If the press covered Bush's nonexistent affair the way it covered Clinton's actual affair—as Clinton eventually admitted— editorials would be denouncing anyone who mentioned it.

A week before the false Bush affair story was relaunched by the media, the
New York Times
had issued a blistering editorial lambasting a “snarling press release” from Bush's deputy campaign manager, Mary Matalin, calling it “raw innuendo,” a “broadside,” “surrogate sleaze”— and claiming that the press release “embarrassed President Bush.” What was this foul excrement? Matalin's press release had mentioned Clinton's “bimbo eruptions”—a term coined by Betsey Wright, Clinton's own deputy campaign chairman. The
Times
went on to praise Bush for being “politically shrewd” when he had attacked an independent ad against Clinton that dared mention Gennifer Flowers.
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“Politically shrewd” is
Times
-speak for “a Republican who is about to lose.”

CNN reporter Mary Tillotson sprang a question about the alleged affair on President Bush during a presidential press conference with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Bush was asked about it again in an Oval Office interview with Stone Phillips for NBC's
Dateline.
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Bush angrily denied the claimed affair and reporters, who would have loved nothing more than to prove a Bush affair, found nothing to substantiate it.

But for voters without the time or inclination to investigate the details, the story was set: Both Bush and Clinton had been accused of having affairs and both had denied it. The ersatz symmetry was captured in a
USA Today
editorial titled: “Jennifer, Gennifer.” John Harwood summarized the situation in the
Wall Street Journal,
saying, “The allegations against both candidates are suspect. Ms. Flowers was paid by a supermarket tabloid to publicize her allegations.” As for President Bush, Harwood said, “the purported source of the allegation against Mr. Bush is dead.” Also, even if he were alive, his evidence was that Bush and his aide had stayed in his guesthouse. Flowers was a somewhat more direct eyewitness to her own affair with Clinton, and she had tapes. But for Harwood, the evidence of both affairs was
equally scanty.
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With the benefit of hindsight, does it appear that the press was giving the voters an accurate picture of the two candidates' alleged affairs?

Clinton was an absolute prince about the rumored Bush affair— while also linking his affair to Bush's—saying, “I didn't like it when it was done to me. And I don't like it when it's done to him. I felt for him. I like him on a personal level.”
⁴⁶
A mere sixteen years later, in 2008, Kurt Andersen told us what Clinton's real reaction was to the press coverage of Bush's alleged affair. (It's great how people like Andersen and Todd Purdum waited until 2008—when Hillary Clinton was challenging the angel Obama—to tell us the truth about Bill Clinton.)

Andersen said Clinton was introduced to a reporter from
Spy
magazine during the 1992 Democratic National Convention at a New York restaurant.
Spy
had just run a cover story with the bold headline “1,000 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush—No. 1: He Cheats on His Wife,” written by rabid Clinton defender Joe Conason, or as liberal Mickey Kaus dubs him, “distinguished chronicler of George H. W Bush's alleged marital infidelity.”
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Andersen reports, “The future president smiled, popped to his feet, and ushered the reporter off for a private chat…. ‘I want to thank you guys,' Clinton told the man from
Spy,
‘for leveling the playing field with that piece you did on Bush's girlfriends.'
But were there more women?
he asked repeatedly in the course of a several-minutes-long chat.”
⁴⁸

It's always the same with Democrats: The candidate gallantly forswears “negative campaigning,” while the press does all the dirty work for him, generating phony scandals for Republicans while burying real scandals of the Democrats.

But they are the victims of Karl Rove.

THE MEDIA's FAVORITE EXCUSE FOR COVERING THE PRIVATE lives of conservatives is “hypocrisy,” a one-way ratchet that apparently demands constant vigilance over the personal foibles of conservatives and a total blackout on much worse behavior by liberals. By peremptorily disavowing personal principles, liberals can never be accused of hypocrisy for not living up to the principles they cheerfully reject. Admittedly,
everyone knows liberals have no moral scruples, but that's not what Democrats say when they are posing for the voters. President Clinton walked to and from church every Sunday carrying a ten-pound Bible for the cameras—and then returned from church on Palm Sunday 1996 to use a cigar as a sexual aid on Monica Lewinsky.

Why didn't this raise an issue of hypocrisy for the media about the Bible-toting churchgoer? How about his flashing Paula Jones when he was the governor of Arkansas? Former Arkansas state employee Jones held a press conference in 1994 claiming that, in 1991, Governor Clinton had pulled a smooth Cary Grant move on her, dropping his pants and asking her to “kiss it.” The establishment media ignored her for more than two years. If Clinton were not a pro-“choice” liberal, I think that would have qualified as “hypocrisy.” The Stalinist self-censorship only began to lift when legal reporter Stuart Taylor wrote a cover story for the November 1996
American Lawyer
magazine, which took Jones's claims seriously and chastised the press for ignoring her.

How about John Edwards's hypocrisy? His entire political life was based on saccharine stories about seeing the light flickering while his old man learned math by watching TV.
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People had to take showers after watching Edwards deliver one of his hokey speeches about being the son of a mill worker. I can't imagine anyone watching him speak and not retching. Then in 2008, he based his entire presidential campaign on his selfless dedication to a cancer-stricken wife. Meanwhile, in order to pass the time between giving $50,000 speeches on poverty, Edwards was cheating on the cancer-stricken wife. No practicing journalist with the establishment media would be able to pinpoint the hypocrisy in that.

But as soon as pro-life, pro-gun, pro-drilling American woman Sarah Palin materialized on the Republican ticket, the press suddenly took a keen interest in hypocrisy again. Or at least their version of “hypocrisy,” by which liberals mean they have spotted a conservative— or better, a Christian.

In an essay posted on the “On Faith” website hosted jointly by
Newsweek
and the
Washington Post,
University of Chicago divinity professor Wendy Doniger (O'Flaherty) said Palin's “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.” Doniger (O'Flaherty) also accused
Palin of “hypocrisy” for “outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people.”
⁵⁰

Claiming that the Republican Party said Palin “speaks for all women” because she “has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies,” Doniger (O'Flaherty) proclaimed that Palin “does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.” I gather Doniger (O'Flaherty) speaks for women— especially working-class women—from her perch at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where she spells “God” with a small
g
and her university bio describes her “interests” as focusing on “two basic areas, Hinduism and mythology.” By way of comparison, Palin's husband is in the United Steel Workers union, her sister and brother-in-law own a gas station, she married her high school sweetheart, and she has five children. Doniger (O'Flaherty)'s classes, the bio continues, cover “cross-cultural expanses” including gender, psychology, dreams, evil, horses, sex, and women.
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At
Newsweek
and the
Washington Post, that's
working-class.

Katha Pollitt of the all-American
Nation
magazine blamed Palin for tricking the media into spreading ugly rumors about her children, giving Palin an opening to triumphantly announce her daughter's embarrassing pregnancy to the world. Just as Doniger (O'Flaherty) had said Palin was hypocritical for “outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people,” Pollitt said, “It takes chutzpah for a mother to
thrust her pregnant teen into the world's harshest spotlight and then demand the world respect the girl's privacy.”
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