Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (30 page)

jack ford: Governor Bush was asked a question about hate crimes law in Texas. And as—as part of his answer, he stressed the fact that three men had been sentenced to death as a result of the killing of James Byrd. Well, it turns out that he’s wrong. Only two men were sentenced to death there. Is that the type of error, the type of mistake that the Bush campaign has—has criticized you for making?

Bush’s misstatement was also the topic of Ford’s interview with Bush:

ford: You had said during the course of your response in the debate that the three people involved in the death of James Byrd were going to get the ultimate penalty, death penalty.

Gov. bush: Yeah. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Two of them are going to get the ultimate penalty.

ford: Two will get the death penalty.

Gov. bush: Three maybe should have.

ford: Yeah.

Gov. bush: But the jury decided otherwise.

ford: The question that people will ask now is—is that, however, the kind of error that you’ve criticized the vice president for making?

Gov. bush: Of course not. No.

ford: Why not?

Gov. bush: I’m telling you right now it’s two instead—instead of three.

Ford then asked Bush if he was an inexperienced dope. Ford probed Bush on “questions about your experience, the fact that you never held a job that dealt with foreign policy” and “questions ... about your intelligence, your ability to grasp presidential issues.”
⁴¹

Gore was asked: “As the vice president of the United States, you’ve had a distinguished career in the House and in the Senate, and yet you find yourself on stage in front of family members and tens of millions of people with a moderator asking questions about your integrity and your credibility. Does that hurt?”

Does that hurt?
Can you imagine this question being asked of a Republican? No—can you imagine this question being asked of an adult?

After Ford had vigorously cross-examined both candidates on Bush’s misstatement, asked Bush if he was stupid, and Gore if he “hurt,” former Clinton hatchetman George Stephanopolous wrapped up with ABC’s signature objective political analysis.

The fact that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet was never mentioned on any
Good Morning America
broadcast, except a few times when Bush referred to it.
⁴²
Nor was it discussed on NBC’s
Today
show. Also not mentioned on either
Good Morning America
or the
Today
show were Gore’s claims about Love Canal or
Love Story
or his inability to identify George Washington at Monticello. This is not meant to suggest any other morning shows did cover Gore’s misstatements. These just happen to be the only searches I ran. Indeed, Gore’s astonishing claim about being the prime mover on the Internet might not ever have been heard on any ABC morning broadcast if Bush hadn’t raised Gore’s delusional Internet claim in his own campaign ads. Those ads were mentioned on ABC news segments in order to denounce Bush for “attacking Al Gore.”
⁴³

Gore’s inanities became well known only through the voice of non-elite America—and only because Gore’s misstatements were so raucously funny. Gems like Gore’s claiming to have invented the Internet tended to capture the imaginations of FM disc jockeys, sports announcers, and late-night comedians. While media blowhards raved about Gore’s colossal intellect, every time the public actually heard Gore, they laughed at him for being such a dork.

It’s always so great to see the reaction of normal Americans to Democrats unfiltered by the courtier press. The dichotomy didn’t start with Gore. The classic media/human split concerned Clinton’s truth telling. Law professors and legal pundits ponderously described President Clinton’s grand jury testimony as “legally accurate.” The D.C. grand jury laughed out loud when they heard it.

Jimmy Carter won “Best in Show” for his nuclear arms consultation with Amy the night before a presidential debate. The next day, the
New York Times
debate analysis began: “The Presidential debate produced no knockout blow, no disastrous gaffe and no immediate, undisputed victor.”
⁴⁴
Though the humor of Carter’s high-level consultation with a little girl totally eluded the media, it did not go unnoticed in other quarters. Placards proclaiming “Amy for Defense Secretary” began turning up at campaign events. Comedian Bob Hope said Amy’s interest in nuclear weapons began when “Uncle Billy gave her a Raggedy Ann doll with a nuclear warhead.” Hope continued: “The only difference between Billy Carter and Jimmy Carter is that Billy has a foreign policy.”
⁴⁵

It took several days of hooting by the American people for the
Washington Post
to figure out that Carter’s “Amy” gaffe had been “the joke of the campaign.”
⁴⁶
The
New York Times
never did figure that out. Eventually the Amy consultation was briefly mentioned in the sports pages but only because former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach kept peppering his NFL football analysis with, “I was talking to my daughter Amy about it.”
⁴⁷
(In the
Times
deadly earnest style: “The remark was similar to one that the President made during his debate against Ronald Reagan last week regarding his daughter’s fears about nuclear proliferation.”
⁴⁸
)

The
Times
has a more delicate gauge for blunders by Republicans. President George H. W. Bush’s evidently monumental misstep of looking at his watch during a 1992 debate with Bill Clinton was mentioned on the
Times’s
front page the next day.
⁴⁹
It was described again in three more election articles that week.
⁵⁰

The same journalist/American dichotomy occurred every time the public got a gander at Al Gore, unfiltered by the media propaganda machine. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, Gore was always strange, but he was strange in different ways. In the first debate, he was his natural self—little Miss-Know-It-All
(“Yugoslavia, as they call Serbia plus Montenegro”).
In the second debate he overcompensated and became Norman Bates in the last scene of
Psycho.
Gore was so tightly wound, you could almost hear him thinking,
I hope they are watching, they will see, they will see and say, “Why, she wouldn’t even hurt a fly.”

Naturally, therefore, the entire nation was on tenterhooks waiting to see what new weirdness Gore would unleash during the third debate. It was brownnoser Tracy Flick from the movie
Election.
Even the audience was laughing at Gore for his ridiculous pomposity. Bush was in on the joke, laughing and winking at audience members as Gore grew increasingly insufferable. It was in that final debate that Bush said Gore’s budget would require three times the spending Clinton had proposed. Gore butted in, as he was wont to do, with this dazzling retort: “That’s in an ad, Jim, that was knocked down by the journalists who analyzed the ad and said it was misleading.” The journalists, Gore proclaimed, “are the keepers of the scorecard.”

Oh—”the journalists.” The “journalists” said Bush’s ad was misleading. The same journalists who had been browbeating the nation with the information that Gore was an intellectual titan. In fact, Gore’s auxiliary staff in the media hadn’t said what Gore claimed they said. (The only mention of the ad was in the
New York Times,
which supported Bush’s statement about Gore’s spending plans, but nitpicked that the ad’s ten-second description of Bush’s plan was “somewhat misleading.”
⁵¹
) So Fibber McGee’s citation of the “journalists” referred to a stupid quibble made by a partisan newspaper about a nongermane point in Bush’s ad.

For every media lie (Gore is a genius), there is invariably a second, auxiliary backup lie sheltering the first lie (the media exaggerates Gore’s mistakes). Thus, while the major media censored Gore’s incessant misstatements with an iron fist, they simultaneously criticized themselves for being so tough on Gore. There was a virtual cottage industry in phony self-criticism about their maltreatment of poor, put-upon Al Gore.

CBS Evening News,
for example, mentioned Gore’s Internet bluster only once—in order to denounce media coverage of Al Gore as having been “dominated by trivia.”
⁵²
It was just that sort of trivia that had been carefully avoided at ABC, NBC, and CBS. The typical mention of Gore’s Internet boast was this from ABC’s
World News Now:
“After months of promising not to go negative, the Bush campaign is going negative.... It’s not about the issues, it’s about Gore’s character ... Why this ad now?... It worked for Bush once before, going negative.”
⁵³

An example of hard news coverage about a serious issue was Bush’s mispronunciation of “subliminal.” That was not paltry “trivia” like Gore claiming to have invented the Internet. Bush’s word slip merited three separate mentions on
CBS Evening News
shows. It was also a news item on NBC’s
Today
show
⁵⁴
and ABC’s
World News Tonight.
⁵⁵

The
Washington Monthly
complained of “exaggerations or even publishing outright falsehoods about Gore.” Gore’s college roommate set up a supposedly nonpartisan website called “The Daily Howler” to expose the media’s ceaseless attacks on Al Gore.
⁵⁶

An immaterial misquote in Gore’s lie about Love Canal was seized upon as an example of how Gore couldn’t get a fair shake from the media. The Love Canal incident began when Gore told a high school audience that he “found” Love Canal. He explained how he was led to Love Canal by a letter he received from a high school girl alerting him to toxic waste in Toone, Tennessee: “I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee—that was the one that you didn’t hear of—but that was the one that started it all.”
⁵⁷

The problem was that Gore’s hearings were held in March 1979—well after Love Canal had been declared a national disaster area. Indeed, it was one of the major news stories of 1978, with front-page stories showing hundreds of people being evacuated from Love Canal. But Gore’s lie became the prime example of how the media maliciously twisted Gore’s statements.

It seems that the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
had misreported Gore’s last sentence as: “/ was the one that started it all”—as opposed to
“that
was the one that started it all.” This was the only part of Gore’s statement that anyone ever claimed the newspapers got wrong. The thing is, changing “I” to “that” didn’t change what Gore had said from being “false” to being “true.” He plainly said that after his Toone, Tennessee, hearings, he had “looked around the country” and “found” Love Canal. “That,” he said, “started it all.” Neither “I” (Gore) nor “that” (his Toone, Tennessee, hearings) started anything regarding Love Canal.

Still, a nongermane misquote from Gore’s Love Canal boast was supposed to demonstrate the press’s unfair attacks on Al Gore. Headlines on articles about the “misquote” proclaimed: “Gore More Victimized Than Guilty of Falsehoods, Press Critics Say.”
⁵⁸
An article in the
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
ruefully said the misquote was “a textbook example” of how people “have come to view the veracity of candidates and reporters.”

Writing in the
Washington Monthly,
Robert Parry claimed the Love Canal “flap” was created when the press “misquoted” Gore and then was “amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media.”
⁵⁹
The “endless” amplification consisted of Gore’s misstatement never passing the lips of anyone on
NBC
or
CBS News
and being mentioned one time on ABC. That was when Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos observed that Gore’s misstatement was merely “a senator’s slip” and that Gore had “fixed” it (by accusing the press of misquoting him, apparently).
⁶⁰

Historian Douglas Brinkley accused the media of engaging in a game of
gotcha
with the Love Canal incident. He claimed Gore “could argue that he was talking about the Tennessee site being the one that he found.”
⁶¹
To restate the facts, Gore said: “I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal.”

Also preposterously billed as a “myth” by the watchdog media was Gore’s claim that he had invented the Internet.
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman asserted, “True, Mr. Gore didn’t invent the Internet—but then, he never said he had.”
⁶²
Slate’s
Mickey Kaus pronounced Gore’s Internet boast “minor, and excusable.”

You see, technically, precisely what Gore said was this: “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” This is supposed to be
completely
different from claiming he had “invented” the Internet. In point of fact, “create” is a synonym for “invent.” Any thesaurus will quickly confirm this. If Gore said he took the initiative to create, develop, devise, or produce the Internet, all of those would be false. An accurate paraphrase is not untrue simply for being a paraphrase. If Gore had said he invented the Internet in French, he still would have said he invented the Internet and it still would have been preposterous.