Bonus tip for direct mail fundraisers: Instead of labeling your envelope with a message like “John Kerry needs your help to save America”, “America’s #1 Export May Soon be Our Jobs”, “Stop John Ashcroft’s Dirty Tricks”, or “Bill Frist Has Personally Killed Numerous Kittens”, I humbly propose an all-purpose attention getter: “Please Send Us More Money”.
Yesterday, I gave an example of the media’s terrible performance as government watchdog. Bob Somerby does this every weekday for his incomparable Daily Howler. Take their series Gore on war:
On September 23, Al Gore gave a speech on the proposed war in Iraq. Here’s a key portion:
I believe this proposed foreshortening of deliberation in the Congress robs the country of the time it needs for careful analysis of exactly what may lie before us. Such consideration is all the more important because the administration has failed thus far to lay out an assessment of how it thinks the course of a war will run—even while it has given free run to persons both within and close to the administration to suggest at every opportunity that this will be a pretty easy matter. And it may well be, but the administration has not said much of anything to clarify its idea of what would follow regime change or the degree of engagement that it is prepared to accept for the United States in Iraq in the months and years after a regime change has taken place.
As Somerby summarizes, “We’re engaged in a hasty deliberation, Gore said. And we haven’t been told what will happen after regime change occurs in Iraq.” Looking back, Gore was quite right. So what did the media say about it at the time?
William Safire, The New York Times:
The day after Gore’s self-contradictory pushmipullyu of a speech, Blair presented a 50-page dossier from British intelligence detailing the dangers to the world from Saddam, including evidence of his present possession of “mobile biological weapons facilities.”
(Apparent argument: If Saddam has got bioweapons labs, there’s no need to plan for whatever happens after we invade.)
Sean Hannity, Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes:
One thing that really stood out–first of all, look at Gore. Look at his hair. It’s a mess. […] He’s sweating profusely, right? He seems very angry at different points in the speech. He didn’t look presidential. I didn’t see any gravitas, any leadership.
(Apparent argument: Gore’s hair is funny; why should we listen to him?)
Matt Lauer, NBC’s Today:
The former vice president became the first of the possible Democratic presidential candidates to lash out at President Bush over his push for war with Saddam Hussein. … Let’s just remember 1991. As a Democratic senator, Al Gore was in favor of going to war against Saddam Hussein to get him out of Kuwait. So why the big turnaround now?
(Apparent argument: If you support one war, shouldn’t you support them all?)
Tim Russert, NBC’s Today:
He clearly is laying the predicate, protecting his options to run for president again. […] It’s quite striking that he has now decided that in the Democratic field, he was staking out this territory. He accused the president of playing to his right-wing base. Many Republicans yesterday were accusing Al Gore of playing to his left-wing base.
(Apparent argument: There’s no need to consider what Gore said, since it’s all positioning for a presidential run.)
Michael Kelly, Washington Post:
Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts—bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.
(Apparent argument: Anyone who tells us to slow down and deliberate is evil.)
Charles Krauthammer, Fox’s Special Report:
[Gore’s speech] offers no alternative. It essentially says—there’s a quote where he says, “We should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction.” Not even eliminate the weapons themselves.
(Apparent argument: If Gore mispeaks about a solution, I can ignore it. And if he has no solutions left, I can ignore him.)
George Will, Fox’s Hannity and Colmes:
[H]e gave it in San Francisco, which I thought was an unfortunate venue because […] it recalled the 1984 convention that they had out there when Jean Kirkpatrick coined the phrase “San Francisco Democrats.” This suggests something a little bit strange in that party.
(Apparent argument: If Gore was talking to gay people, I can ignore him.)
Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank, CNN’s Reliable Sources:
HOWARD KURTZ: [A]ll this analysis and psychobabble about what was Gore doing and he was appealing to the left, and he was positioning himself for 2004. Any possibility this is what Gore really believes or should it be reported in a strictly political context?
MILBANK: Well, it’s funny. Here’s a time when Al Gore actually took a risk and conceivably did something principled, and he didn’t get any credit for it at all. That’s partially our fault, perhaps, but it’s also partially his fault. During the speech, at one point, he leveled all these criticism and then said, well, wait, I’m not actually saying this. There are other people who have said this.
So that sort of gave the opening for this sort of—this industry of sort of Al Gore haters to jump on it and say just another bit of the typical Al Gore.
(Apparent argument: If Gore-haters find something to attack about Gore’s speech, I don’t have to report about its content.)
National Review’s Byron York, same show:
KURTZ: On the other hand, Byron York, did the media do a good job of pointing out some of the contradictions between what Gore was saying this week and his vote for the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and some of what he’s had to say since then about Saddam Hussein?
YORK: Right. That would have been the bigger news story, it seems to me.
KURTZ: The bigger news story—bigger than what Gore actually said?
YORK: Well, the fact that it was a major restatement of some of the things that he has said in the past.
(Apparent argument: If Gore voted for one war, he can’t oppose another. And his violation of this rule is more important than whatever he might say.)
Did we need to slow down and think more about whether we should go to war or not? Had the administration planned for the war’s aftermath sufficiently? Apparently that wasn’t worth discussing. Instead, they talked about his hair, his lack of proposals, his supposed flip-flopping, his supposed presidential race positioning, and his minor mispeaks. I guess that was more fun.
You can see why the Daily Howler can be depressing. But it provides much more than these bare quotes; each day it tells a story with background and context and, of course, humor. The author, Bob Somerby, is not a journalistic historian but a comedian.
Watch the comedians: The Daily Howler.
posted June 21, 2004 03:54 PM (Politics) (7 comments) #