Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (28 page)

Astonishingly, Bush had even been mocked for his advisors.
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman put the case this way: “A lot of people say that Mr. Bush, while he knows little foreign policy, has hired smart advisors. Oh, really? Well what happens when his two smartest advisors disagree?”
¹²³

Somehow that devilish conundrum worked itself out. There was no question that it was he who was calling the shots. It was he who made the central decision to go after the entire Al-Quida terrorist organization after CIA director George Tenet raised the “sobering thought” that Al-Quida was a “60-country problem.”
¹²⁴
Not Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, not National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, not Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Recall that the pop quiz had been treated like the Rosetta stone of presidential qualifications.
USA Today
reported that Bush’s performance on the pop quiz had intensified “concerns” that he “lacks the intellectual heft to be Commander in chief.”
¹²⁵
Showing great prescience, the article also complained that Bush had made matters worse by appearing to “put a positive spin on last month’s military coup in Pakistan.”
¹²⁶
This was the coup that installed General Musharraf—who became America’s indispensable ally in the war on terrorism.

New York Times
columnist Friedman had claimed the pop quiz was important because it told us how Bush “feels” about these countries.
¹²
’ Good call. Another
Times
columnist, Maureen Dowd, said Bush should have seen it coming: “The question has been hanging out there for months about whether Bush the Younger knows enough about the world to deal with all the loons, coups and wars that spring up like twisters across the post-cold-war plains.”
¹²⁸

Time
magazine triumphantly proclaimed that “the quiz was as much a test of his political radar as of his foreign-policy smarts.” That article also made the inane argument that Bush was in no position to complain about “a media ambush” because his own education reforms required “testing what students know before allowing them to advance to the next grade.”
¹²⁹

This must have struck
Newsweek’s
Jonathan Alter as a devastating critique since he made the same incredibly weird point a week later. It “was “ironic,” Alter said, that Bush had criticized social promotion in schools and now he would “be tested repeatedly by the press on his knowledge of foreign policy” where there would “be no social promotion.”
¹³⁰

Obviously, some portion of the population knew it was being lied to all along—and some portion of the population knew it was doing the lying. But there are also many people who mechanically adopt any and all fashionable platitudes. They will look you straight in the eye, every four years for their entire insipid lives, and insist that the Republican de jour is “stupid.” (Cher on Bush: “He’s stupid.”
¹³¹
)

When America was attacked, even that segment of the populace had to pull itself away from Lifetime TV for five minutes to watch the president. And, suddenly, the media had some ‘splaining to do. The Oracle of Delphi was fast losing credibility. Liberals couldn’t just own up and admit they had lied about Bush (Coolidge, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Quayle). So instead, they began promoting an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” theory of Bush’s performance in wartime. It seemed like a perfectly plausible story to claim war had miraculously transformed a dopey, smirking frat boy into ... SUPER BUSH! The only alternative was for the media to admit they had lied.

Thus the
New York Times
earnestly reported that Bush had been “transformed.”
¹³²
He had begun “coming of age as president.”
¹³³
Another
Times
article claimed, “You could almost see him growing into the clothes of the presidency.”
¹³⁴
Universal receptacle for liberal clichés, Richard Cohen of the
Washington Post
rolled out all the excuses in a single column, saying Bush had “grown,” “rise[n] to the occasion,” “gained confidence,” and “seemed emboldened by the heroism of others.”
¹³⁵

In case it was still not clear that this was definitely not the
same
George W. Bush the media had relentlessly called an idiot and probably dyslexic, the
New York Times
observed that Bush had found “the eloquence that has eluded him so often in the past.”
¹³⁶
Another
Times
reporter detected in Bush a “spontaneous new intensity” and a “new resolution” in his voice.
¹³⁷
Democratic Representative Richard A. Gephardt remarked on how strong Bush had been—”these last few days.”
¹³⁸
Bush’s eloquent speeches were called “a surprising development for a president who has often seemed rhetorically challenged.”
¹³⁹
After praising Bush’s speech,
Times
columnist Bob Herbert duly noted that Bush “seldom wanders into the precincts of eloquence.”
¹⁴⁰

Bush wasn’t the only Republican who was mysteriously transformed by the war. Shortly before he became a national sex symbol, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was the subject of gleeful sneering by
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, who wittily called him “Rip Van Rummy.” Proclaiming that “poor Rummy” was hopelessly out of touch,
¹⁴¹
Dowd snipped that he was “clueless about the press.” In a reappearance of smirking foreign leaders, she fretted that “the Russians wonder if he’s slept through the last decade.” The “urgent question,” the supercilious
Times
columnist announced, was “just how conscious of the world around him Rip Van Rummy is.” In a ringing peroration, Dowd declared that Rumsfeld—as well as Vice President Dick Cheney—do “not know anything about how the world works.” The “most striking thing is how out of touch they act.”

Remember this when they call the next Republican “clueless.”

EIGHT

clever is as clever does: the liberal dilemma

In a single
New York Times
profile, a presidential candidate was repeatedly quoted using such expressions as “That’s no good for sure” and “Isn’t she cool?” Telling a reporter he wanted to discuss “big think” ideas, he stammered, “I can’t say this, it’s going to sound so weird.” That was intellectual colossus Al Gore. Naturally, this led the
New York Times
to query: “Is Gore too smart to be president?” Mr. Gore’s “challenge,” the
Times
explained in that very article, is “to show that he is a regular guy despite a perceived surplus of gravitas, which at least some Americans seem to find intimidating.” Or as Gore himself eruditely put it: “weird.”

This is one of the grave injustices of the world: Democrats can run ridiculous and insubstantial men for important national offices and no one will ever know because the media won’t report it. It is as unthinkable to describe a Democrat as stupid as it is to describe a Republican as smart. The adversary press will finish a Democrat’s sentences for him, defend his arguments, provide substantiation for his ludicrous claims, and refuse to report his mistakes.

Gore is only the most recent Democratic mediocrity to dazzle media shills with his genius. Whenever the public fails to be similarly dazzled, the media leaps in to explain that the Democratic mediocrity is “too smart” to connect with ordinary voters. Thus, a columnist in the
Los Angeles Times
ruefully explained in the media’s formulaic excuse, Gore was “too smart for [his] own good.” Sadly, the “best and brightest student”—that’s Gore here— “doesn’t always get to be class president.”
¹

One of the first Democrats to have his vast unpopularity with voter? attributed to his soaring intellect was Adlai Stevenson. Widely known as a lover of literature, with an erudite wit, Stevenson was supposed to be the thinking man’s president. Though it was blindingly obvious at the time that Stevenson was a boob—certainly clear to the American people who continually rejected him for president—only later was Stevenson discovered to be a lowbrow who
rarely read
books. When he died, only a single book was found on his nightstand:
The Social Register.
²

This has been a fifty-year game of the Emperor’s New Brain, in which only true intellectuals (the media) are capable of discerning a Democrat’s profound intellect.
U.S. News & World Report
wearily recounted the Herculean efforts the Clinton campaign was forced to undertake to conceal Clinton’s towering intellect. His campaign staff “took great pains to ‘dumb down’ Clinton.”
³
The author snippily added that this “won’t be Bush’s problem.”
Time
magazine also addressed the question of how Clinton dealt with the problem of being so brilliant. “In politics, it’s not smart to seem too smart. Bill Clinton uses his intellect to dazzle audiences, but he does it in an inclusive way. He articulates things people know but can’t quite express.”
⁴
The same article somberly reported that Hillary “was the Woman Who Knew Too Much.”
⁵
She “sometimes can’t help intimidating” voters with her grasp of the issues.

Other Democrats alleged to have been disadvantaged by their oversize intellects include Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Bradley. Also every other Democrat you’ve ever heard of.

Dukakis was so smart he was unaware of his wife Kitty’s twenty-six-year addiction to diet pills.
⁶
As the
Los Angeles Times
reported, Dukakis “said he did not know of her habit until she underwent treatment in 1982.” In light of Dukakis’s renowned “attention to detail,” the
Times
said, “even [Kitty’s] sister was surprised at his professed ignorance.”
⁷
He also displayed his towering intellect by advising Iowa farmers during the 1988 campaign that they should be growing Belgian endive.

Walter Mondale cleverly informed the voters in the middle of a campaign that he was going to raise their taxes. He also deftly sent his media strategists out to explain that the guy who had just walloped him in a debate was a senile old weakling.
⁸

Jimmy Carter was so intelligent, he claimed to have been attacked by a killer rabbit during the 1980 campaign.
⁹
In a nationally televised debate with Reagan, Carter smartly said that, in preparation for the debate, he had solicited the opinion of his teenage daughter Amy on nuclear war.

Senator Bill Bradley, Democrat of New Jersey, was well known to newspaper readers everywhere by his unofficial first name “Cerebral.” The
Boston Globe
reported that unless “the cerebral Bill Bradley” caught on, “Gore appears to be the candidate.”
¹⁰
The
San Francisco Chronicle
said the “cerebral Bradley wants to talk about his many ideas about tax policy and defense restructuring.”
¹¹
The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
described Bradley’s run-of-the-mill, tax-and-spend liberalism as “his cerebral approach to politics.”
¹²
The
Boston Globe
said Bradley exuded “cerebral self-deprecation.”
¹³
And CNN political analyst and
Los Angeles Times
columnist Ron Brownstein informed CNN viewers that Bradley was “cerebral.”
¹⁴

It was too much intellect for one man. Eventually, Bradley’s soaring IQ began to infect his supporters and liberal colleagues. In the sort of major puff piece that makes Republicans nervous, the
New York Times Magazine
hailed half-wit “moderate” Republican Senator Susan Collins (Me.) as “reminiscent of Bill Bradley”—because she is “too cerebral.”
¹⁵
CNN’s William Schneider
¹⁶
and the
Los Angeles Times
¹⁷
both reported that Bradley voters, too, were “cerebral.”

But then—whoops!—it turned out Bradley got a 485 on his verbal SATs.
¹⁸
That’s “cerebral” for a Democrat. Dumb George Bush got a 566, which was lower than Gore’s 625—but a lot higher than Bradley’s 485. (For those of you who took the SAT after 1994, all these scores would be higher under the new inflated scoring system.
¹⁹
)

Let the record reflect that an octogenarian former Republican president who makes a two-syllable slip in an otherwise flawlessly delivered convention speech is an idiot, but a Democratic presidential candidate who gets a 485 on his SATs is “cerebral.” The “cerebral” Bradley’s very non-Princetonian SAT score was not discovered by
Time, Newsweek,
or the
New York Times.
They were too busy with the hard-hitting investigative work of calling Bush dumb. Mr. Cerebral’s SAT score was outed on the Internet.

Even after the truth was out, the serious media barely alluded to the mammoth hole that had been blown in Bradley’s “cerebral” image. Those that did mention it cited Bradley’s low score as part of the burgeoning case that Bush was dumb or, alternatively, that the test was dumb. It being a metaphysical impossibility for a Democrat to be dumb, this was the only other possible explanation for Bradley’s low score. The
New York Times
dropped the bomb in the Education section of the paper, concluding that
both
Bradley’s and Bush’s scores “offer two more pieces of evidence that the SAT is not an exceptional predictor of success.” The headline on
U.S. News & World Report’s
article on Bradley’s scores was incomprehensibly titled “Who’s the dimmest dim bulb?” Jay Leno joked, “The bad news is that Bush may be the smart one.” The
Washington Post
said that Bradley’s low score “cannot be good news for the people who run the Educational Testing Service,” since it raised old charges that the test “does not reflect real aptitude or accurately predict success.”
²⁰