Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (29 page)

The media’s designation of all Democrats as smart and all Republicans as dumb had finally been contradicted by cold, hard evidence. But instead of exposing media bias, the facts had to be shoehorned into a different theory.

If Bush is a dope with a 566 on the verbal SAT, but a 485 makes a Democrat “cerebral,”
²¹
what were Pinch Sulzberger’s SAT scores? Liberals whose principal argument against Republican after Republican is that they are all idiots should put up or shut up. We want the scores of every reporter who ever sneered at the intelligence of Reagan and Bush. Especially Maureen Dowd and Howell Raines.

While we wait, let’s consider the media’s most stunning accomplishment since persuading the public that Adlai Stevenson “was not a bilious blowhard: turning Al Gore into a genius. Even with years of practice, this was quite a feat. Among Gore’s “big think” ideas was his proposal to ban the internal combustion engine. In the 2000 presidential campaign, he paid a feminist $15,000 a month to teach him how to be a man. He said he created the Internet. He claimed to be the inspiration for
Love Story.
He described his childhood (spent in the penthouse apartment of the Fairfax Hotel) as “cleaning out hog waste, clearing land with an ax, and plowing hillsides with a team of mules.” Gore couldn’t identify George Washington and Benjamin Franklin at Monticello.

In a 1994 speech, Gore got the country’s national motto backward, saying,
“E Pluribus Unum
—out of one many.”
²²
He called Chicago Bulls forward Michael Jordan “Michael Jackson.” (This last mistake was written up in the
Washington Post
in an article that attributed the error to George Bush and was titled “Bush’s Gaffes Are Back as Debates Near.”)
²³
When it was Bush’s mistake, the misstatement was big news, but when it turned out Gore had said it, it proved absolutely nothing and was promptly forgotten.

Rather, the question on every journalist’s mind was, Will Gore’s “brainy earnestness ... deny him the larger prize”?
(USA Today).
²⁴
Or as the
New York Times
put it (citing the thoughts of “many”): “Many perceive that Mr. Gore is too smart for his own good.”
²⁵
In the unique analysis of
U.S. News & World Report,
“Gore is very smart, but he is almost too smart.”
²⁶

In case Gore’s robust intelligence had somehow failed to impress the public, the media issued repeated updates on the fact that Gore was smart. Amid vague citations to “voters,” the
New York Times,
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USA Today,
^2B
the
Los Angeles Times
^2<)
and the
National Journal,
³⁰
among many many others, all proclaimed Gore is “smart.” Gore’s subtle intellect was vividly captured by journalists Maureen Dowd
³¹
and David Gergen,
³²
both of whom wrote: “Gore is smart.”

These were, of course, the understated descriptions of Gore’s intellectual prowess. More common was hallucinatory overstatement.
Newsweek
gasped that Gore was “thinking about complexity theory, open systems, Goethe and the absence of scientific metaphors in modern society.”
³³
Bloomberg News said Gore was impatient “with those a few IQ points short of genius” (which evidently included George Bush, who was said to be “no genius”).
³⁴

One of the formulaic benedictions for Gore was that he is “the smartest kid in the class”—as he was described in dozens of articles in the year 2000 alone.
³⁵
(This was in dramatic contrast to Bush, who, in addition to not being the “sharpest knife in the drawer,” also “ain’t the smartest kid in the class,” according to the
New York Times
—quoting others to maintain reportorial distance.
³⁶
)

Being the “smartest kid in the class” was not all sunshine and song. To be sure, it meant Gore was smart (!). But it was also supposed to explain why voters seemed not to like him: He was just too damned smart. Except it turned out, again in the harsh light of facts, just because no one liked him didn’t mean Gore was “the smartest kid in the class.” Far from it. Gore’s real school records were abominable. In high school, Gore received mostly Cs and Bs in English and history. He got all Cs in French. Only in art classes did Gore earn straight As. (And he took a lot of art classes.) Gore was admitted to Harvard—but he was the son of a prominent United States senator when applying to college.

Oddly, it was Bush who was routinely accused of having sailed through life on his father’s name. But the truth was the reverse. The media was manipulating the fact that—many years later—Bush’s father became president. When Bush was admitted to Yale, his father was a little-known congressman on the verge of losing his first Senate race. His father was a Yale alumnus, but so were a lot of other boys’ parents. It was Gore, not Bush, who had a famous father likely to impress college admissions committees.

Having gotten in to Harvard at least in part on the basis of his father’s prominence, Gore did not redeem himself. In his sophomore year at Harvard, Gore got one D, one C-minus, two Cs, two C-pluses, and one B-minus. This, the
Washington Post
reported, “placed him in the bottom fifth of the class for the second year in a row.”
³⁷
Gore’s grades that year “were lower than any semester recorded on Bush’s transcript from Yale.” Conforming to the
New York Times
stylebook on how to report negative information about a Democrat, the
Post
slipped in an untrue and irrelevant potshot at Bush. The
Post
headline was: “Gore’s Grades Belie Image of Studiousness; His School Transcripts Are a Lot Like Bush’s.”
³⁸

After college, Bush earned an M.B.A. from Harvard; Gore failed out of divinity school and dropped out of law school at Vanderbilt University. Gore failed five of his eight classes at divinity school. Here’s a question for modern philosophers: How many classes does a Democrat have to fail in order not to be called “smart”?

Bolstering the media’s message that Gore was very smart—maybe too smart—during the Democratic National Convention, an endless stream of Gore’s friends and relatives took the stage to issue personal testimonials about what a clever jokester Gore was in private. By the end of it all you had to marvel at how well Gore had kept that amazing wit under wraps. He must reach Olympian heights when he’s alone in the bathtub.

His convention speech-of-a-lifetime did bear witness to how his enormous cleverness seems to dissipate whenever anyone was watching. In the verbal equivalent of George Bush Sr. looking at his watch during the 1992 townhall debate, Gore could not read his speech fast enough. He just kept rushing through his windbag of a speech and stepping on his applause lines as if he wanted to spit out the whole garbled mess as quickly as possible and get back to the bathtub where he really hits his humor stride.

Bush couldn’t name three foreign leaders? Gore couldn’t name his own positions. On
Meet the Press,
Tim Russert asked Gore for his position on a bill that would prohibit the execution of pregnant women on death row. Gore’s response was—and I quote—”I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Russert tried restating the question several times, but Gore kept insisting he would need to know “the circumstances.” The only pertinent

“circumstances” were fully contained within the question: A pregnant “woman is on death row. Would you be for a law preventing her execution until she gives birth? Gore didn’t know.

The good part of being a Democrat is that you can commit crimes, sell out your base, bomb foreigners, and rape women, and the Democratic faithful will still think you’re the greatest. The bad part is that you must effortlessly follow the party orthodoxy, which is completely impenetrable to human logic. Adhering to Democratic Party principles, the correct answer is, Kill the fetus and spare the murderess. Since Democrats can’t just come out and say that, the situation obviously called for hostile evasion. Though he had spent years studying with the master, Gore could not produce the proper Clintonesque dodge: I’ve already answered that, this legislation is politically motivated, it’s a private matter between the woman and “her God,” the question has been propounded by a vast right-wing conspiracy, and I didn’t do it.

Gore once claimed the biblical story of Cain and Abel was a parable about the dangers of pollution. Not original sin, not murder, not envy: pollution. “Indeed,” he wrote in his magnum opus,
Earth in the Balance,
“the first instance of ‘pollution’ in the Bible occurs when Cain slays Abel.” According to Gore, God was hopping mad about Cain polluting. Cain had “defiled the ground” with Abel’s messy blood. Murder is one thing, but polluting really got God’s goat. In Gore’s view, the Bible inveighs against global warming and the internal combustion engine, but has nothing of any relevance to say on the matter of killing the unborn.

When pressed by the
New York Times
to expand upon his singular interpretation of the Cain and Abel story, Gore explained that God’s original rebuff of Cain’s offering of the fruit of the ground (which set off Cain’s murderous jealousy—and the first recorded case of pollution) was simply “a metaphorical reference to the move from a herding to an agricultural economy.”

I don’t know. God works in mysterious ways and all, but His repudiation of agriculture products doesn’t seem like the most lucid manner of promoting an agricultural economy.

In the second presidential debate, Gore segued directly from global warming to Scripture: “In my faith tradition, it’s written in the Book of Matthew, where your heart is, there is your treasure also. And, I believe that we ought to recognize the value to our children and grandchildren of taking steps that preserve the environment in a way that’s good for them.” Skipping right past that preposterous “faith tradition” locution—a PC phrase for a religion you were brought up in and that voters have heard about but that you don’t actually, technically speaking, in the narrow sense, believe—the book of Matthew emphatically does
not
say what Gore said it says.

The vice president’s bungling misquote didn’t just reverse Christ’s words, but also reversed His meaning. Christ’s real quote comes in the middle of a teaching warning that man “cannot serve God and mammon.” He is commanding us to abjure “treasure upon earth,” and instead to build “treasures in heaven.” So when Christ says, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” it’s an admonition that if your treasure is anyplace but with God, then your heart cannot be with God (and you’ll burn in hell).

To mangle Christ’s quote into “where your heart is, there is your treasure also” and to suggest that the environment should be our treasure was not just stupid, it was aggressively anti-Christian. Gore’s rendition sounds like some inspirational saying a guidance counselor might put on his office wall—”If you love soccer, follow your heart! ... Where your heart is, there your treasure shall be! ... Go for it!” Christ’s whole point was that if your heart is with soccer (the environment, mammon, whatever) and not with Him, you’re going to burn in hell. Hell ought to have gotten Gore’s attention. All that burning probably causes pollution.

Gore spent much of his campaign denying any memory of his legally questionable fund-raising. Even Gore’s campaign staff at the
New York Times
remarked on how often Gore’s memory—”considered to be quite excellent—fails.” When asked on Fox News how it was that his subpoenaed White House E-mails got lost, the Inventor of the Internet protested that he was “not an expert on computers.”
³⁹

Of his Buddhist temple fund-raiser, Gore said: “I’ll tell you what I learned from it, which is that we need campaign finance reform.” So, by virtue of breaking the law, he was in a better position to reform it?

The easiest path to being recognized as a genius in America is to become a completely predictable, run-of-the-mill, redistributionist Democrat. Then no matter how dumb you are and how many ludicrous lies you keep telling, the media will only remark on your dazzling brilliance. Gore explained that it wasn’t a “fund-raiser,” it was an “event to raise funds.” He’s a modern Wittgenstein!

n the classic “adversary media” approach, during the 2000 presidential campaign
Good Morning America^
rigorously grilled both Bush and Gore on a misstatement made by Bush. To provide some context, at this point in the campaign Gore had claimed the following: He had discovered Love Canal (in fact, it had already been declared a national disaster area by President Carter months before Gore noticed it); his father was voted out of office for his courageous stand on civil rights (though his father voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act); his mother sang him a union lullaby in his crib (this is highly unlikely inasmuch as his father had just cast a major anti-labor vote and the song didn’t exist until Al Jr. was twenty-seven years old); he was a co-sponsor of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill (an impossibility since he never served in Congress with Senator Feingold); he had taken “a risk” in asking the former prime minister of Russia to get “personally involved” in Kosovo (though President Boris Yeltsin of Russia had already designated Mr. Chernomyrdin as special envoy to the Balkans weeks earlier); he created the Internet (see
infra);
and had been the inspiration for
Love Story
(yikes!).

Thus, the question put to Gore on
Good Morning America
was this: