Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (26 page)

After having spent months dutifully creating an “issue” about a Republican’s intelligence—nourishing it, protecting it from dissenting opinions, writing about it from this angle and that angle, taking it out and polishing it up again—the press then jumps on the smallest misstatement by a Republican on the grounds that it reinforces “impressions.” Trading anonymity for instant celebrity, Andy Hiller, political correspondent for WHDH-TV in Boston, sprung a pop quiz on Bush early in the presidential campaign. The reporter demanded that Bush name the leaders of India, Pakistan, Chechnya, and Taiwan.

Bush exasperately refused to answer two world leader questions, gave the name of one leader, and described another. (Inasmuch as this was during the Clinton era, many Americans were frankly relieved at Bush’s response, hoping that if we couldn’t name their leaders, perhaps they couldn’t name ours.) The media reacted as if Bush had been unable to locate Canada on a map. On the morning of November 15,1999, this was major headline news across America:

“Pressed by a Reporter, Bush Falls Short in World Affairs Quiz”

New York Times

“Bush Fails Boston Reporter’s Surprise Quiz in Interview”

USA Today

“Bush Names 1 of 4 World Leaders in Questions from Reporters”

Dallas Morning News

“Bush Fails Surprise Foreign Affairs Test”

“Bush Flunks Reporter’s Pop Quiz”

Boston Globe

Atlanta Journal- Constitution

“Pop Quiz on World Leaders Trips Up Bush”

Philadelphia Inquirer77

George Stephanopoulos recited the DNC talking points memo as part of his objective analysis on ABC’s
Good Morning America.
It seems the quiz incident raised an “underlying question” about Bush’s qualifications and suggested that Bush was not “sure-footed”: “There have been questions about George Bush’s experience with foreign policy and his knowledge. He hasn’t been surefooted on foreign policy this campaign... When the war in Kosovo came up, he wasn’t surefooted in his responses. I think his campaign now is going to have a very hard time calming people down about whether Governor Bush is up to this.”
⁷⁸

This was 1999—the Republican primaries hadn’t even gotten under way yet. (To his eternal credit, MSNBC’s Brian Williams began questioning Clinton flack Paul Begala about the quiz, saying: “I assume you are going to tell us here, tonight, that the Bill Clinton of Little Rock, Arkansas, of 1991 and ‘2 knew every name of every foreign leader.”)
⁷⁹

The pop quiz dominated the talk shows for days, including the Sunday morning political shows and every major newspaper and magazine in the country. Bush was directly questioned about it on ABC’s
This Week.
^so
There was palpable joy on the
New York Times
op-ed page. In one of literally hundreds of articles on the incident,
Time
magazine described the pop quiz as ; “critical moment” for Bush.
Newsweek
reported that the Bush campaign was “spin doctoring madly.”
⁸¹
The
Washington Post
uncritically quoted Gore campaign officials comparing Bush’s performance on a meaningless pop quiz to Gore’s claim to have invented the Internet.
⁸²
Not knowing this week’s leader of Cameroon was the equivalent of pathological lying.

Andy Hiller, the wise-ass local reporter who sprung the pop quiz on Bush, was giddily feted as if he had just invented cold fusion. It was such a galling spectacle that even the
New York Times
expressed “hope” that the incident would not “tempt other journalists away from a deeper, more probing style of questioning.”
⁸³

On the off chance that the public had missed the point, the media quickly sketched out the larger themes. Fascinatingly, these were the exact same themes the press sees with any Republican presidential candidate: (1) It reinforced “impressions” that Bush was dumb; and (2) it raised questions about how Bush reacted under fire. Thus, in a typical exegesis on the pop quiz, a
Kansas City Star
columnist said the pop quiz raised doubts about “Bush’s most glaring weakness.” It showed that “the frat boy born with a silver spoon still has something to prove.”
⁸⁴

Over at the
New York Times,
they were mainly upset about Bush’s facial expressions. Despite the incredible importance of the facial expression issue,
Times
columnists gave diametrically opposed descriptions of what Bush’s facial expression was. Maureen Dowd wrote: “His interview smirk—that anti-intellectual bravado—was jarring.”
⁸⁵
On the very same page, the very same day,
Times
op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman described Bush’s reaction as the exact opposite of a smirk: “It was the Quayle-in-the-headlights look.”
⁸⁶
So which was it? Cocky smirk or stupid, frightened stare? Whatever. The main point was the quiz was major news. The media’s own lunatic over-reaction turned the story into World War III.

Contrarily, the press maintained radio silence on stories embarrassing to Gore. For example—as long as we’re on the subject of world leaders—Al Gore couldn’t pick George Washington out of a lineup. In a highly publicized stop at Monticello during Clinton’s 1993 inaugural festivities, Gore pointed to carvings of Washington and Benjamin Franklin and asked the curator: “Who are those guys?” He was surrounded by reporters and TV cameras when he said it. Only one newspaper,
USA Today,
reported the gaffe.
⁸⁷

The pop quiz soon raised a delicate matter even more urgent than Bush-bashing: How many answers should the opinion makers lyingly claim they could have gotten right? Eventually, the blabocracy bravely settled on “only two” as the appropriate answer. This was probably because Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security advisor, admitted he would have known the answer to only two. Noticeably, only two well-known commentators admitted that they could have identified only one of the world leaders (the same one Bush got): George Will and Chris Matthews. Say what you will about Will and Matthews, neither can be accused of lacking intellectual confidence.

On NBC’s
Later Today,
the hostesses interrupted news on “surprise” recipes and home-designing tips to ridicule Bush for his ignorance. Host Asha Blake (“Her goal? To find foods and a lifestyle that give her energy”)
⁸⁸
sneered: “Somebody running for presidential office, a presidential candidate, should know the names of foreign leaders.” On a break from her busy brain-surgery schedule,
Later Today
co-host Jodi Applegate complained: “I mean, it’s not like he’s being asked about some obscure leader in some obscure country.”
⁸⁹
Zbigniew Brzezinski: two; George Will: one. Telegenic half-wits don’t even know enough to know what smart people are supposed to know.

A fairly extensive LexisNexis search turns up only two people who claimed they could have named all four leaders—a Democrat pundette on Fox News’s
Hannity and Colmes
named Jenny ... and Al Gore.

The media’s fanatical obsession with Bush’s minor slips of tongue says nothing about Bush’s intelligence and everything about how liberals demean their political opponents rather than argue with them. Every human being occasionally stumbles over words. Only Republicans have their stumbles giddily repeated ad nauseam, analyzed and used as epithets, until more Americans can recite a simple slip of tongue by a Republican than can place the Civil War in the correct century. You would think the geniuses in the media had never made a mistake themselves. The often lengthy and hilarious “corrections” section of the
New York Times
belies that impression.

The
New York Times
launched one of its typical substantiveless sneers at George W. Bush’s intelligence when he first considered running for president in March 1999: “Mr. Bush has embarked on a cram course that could be titled ‘What you need to know to run for President.’... There may never have been a ‘serious’ candidate who needed it more.”
⁹⁰
A “correction” issue four days later stated that the last sentence was not supposed to appear in the article, but was a “message between editors after the article was written” that somehow ended up in the article text.
⁹¹

Throughout impeachment, commentators were constantly calling Clinton “Nixon,” and to this day say “impeach” when they mean “remove” (as in, “President Clinton was not impeached”). Months after he finally left office, impeached former president Clinton was introduced by a member of the New-York Historical Society as “Richard Nixon.”
⁹²
Over on NBC, John McLaughlin—no slouch—made what came to be a very common slip, referring to Whitewater as “Watergate.”

Even TV personalities with TelePrompTers and earpieces who only have to speak coherently for an hour a day are constantly making verbal slips that would never be forgotten if they had passed the lips of George Bush on his fourteenth campaign stop in a single day. Turn on a TV news program right now and you’ll see one.

After the first 2000 presidential debate, CBS’s Bob Schieffer remarked, “[I] think George Bush’s weakest moment—when—when he turned on Bush’s character.”
⁹³
The next day NBC’s Tom Brokaw confused the $4.6 trillion estimated surplus with the rather more substantial $25 trillion spending estimate. Interviewing Bush, Brokaw said, “Almost everyone who is an authority in this area says that both you and the vice president are way too optimistic when we talk about this $25 trillion surplus, that there’s a very good possibility that we’ll never get to that number.”
⁹⁴
When Bush merely confused “billion” and “trillion” in the heat of a presidential campaign, the
Washington Post
leapt on the slip to proclaim that Bush had “bolstered” his critics.
⁹⁵

Word stumbles by Democratic politicians are hard to come by, inasmuch as they are not recycled endlessly in peevish Maureen Dowd columns. Democrat errors are buried, forgotten, ignored, and lied about. Sometimes they are even falsely attributed to Republicans. When absolutely forced to report on a Democrat’s gaffe, the media insistently include a Republican’s error as well, so that it can be reported that both candidates are idiots.

One of the more outrageous examples of the media cushioning a Democrat’s error with an alleged Republican comparable error concerned Clinton’s bungling incomprehension of what the Patriot missile does. In a campaign speech on September 8, 1992, Clinton said: “We come up with great ideas and then turn them into things like the Patriot missile, which will go through doors and down chimneys.”
⁹⁶
This was an extremely embarrassing error about missile technology. The Patriot missile is a purely defensive missile: It is a surface-to-air missile designed to shoot down incoming missiles, not objects on the ground, like chimneys.

If it were possible for “impressions” to be “reinforced” about Democrats, Clinton’s mistake might have been said to reinforce impressions that he knew nothing about the military. National defense was arguably even more important than the proper spelling of “potato.” Dan Quayle quickly rejoined that Clinton had “confused the Patriot with the cruise missile. Bill Clinton knows less about national security than I do about spelling.”
⁹⁷

This is how the mainstream media reported on Clinton’s gaffe and Quayle’s retort: The
Los Angeles Times
said, “Quayle had to extract both feet from his own mouth. He too had the wrong missile.”
⁹⁸
Time
magazine said: “Quayle tweaked Clinton for referring in a speech to Patriot missiles going ‘down chimneys’ during the Gulf War. Ha, said Quayle: ‘Bill Clinton knows less about national security than I do about spelling!’ The weapons, said Quayle, were cruise missiles. Join the club, Dan. They were smart bombs.”
⁹⁹
CNN’s Frederick Allen said that “neither side had much luck when it came to discussing national security,” because “[a]ctually, these things are called smart bombs—which gives them a distinction from the candidates.”
¹⁰⁰

Who was right? The combined intellectual firepower of the
Los Angeles Times, Time,
and CNN—or Dan Quayle? The answer is: Dan Quayle. Neither the cruise missile nor smart bombs literally go down chimneys—but in theory, both could, and about equally well.
¹⁰¹
Thus, when talking about weapons that can “go down chimneys and through doors,” it would be accurate to refer to either cruise missiles or smart bombs. By contrast, the Patriot missile—identified by Clinton as going down chimneys—has nothing whatsoever to do with precise targeting. But the media was so determined to call Quayle an idiot, they could not bear reporting that Quayle had caught Clinton making a mistake. So they simply lied and reported that Quayle was wrong, too.

If accurately correcting a Democrat makes you an idiot, God help any Republican who misplaces a syllable. In the 2000 presidential election, the
ABC News
website carefully catalogued Bush’s every word slip in a section titled “The English Patient.” There was no “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” section for Gore’s incessant lies. Indeed, the misstatements of Democrats are extremely difficult to come by inasmuch as no record of them is meticulously compiled by media watchdogs.