For use: Monday, October 29, 2000 and thereafter

mfinley.com: "Achy Breaky Head"

by Michael Finley

So I'm driving this young woman to school -- not my daughter, because she won't let me write about her in my columns any more.

And I mention that my readers are jumping all over me this week because I have been writing about politics, and not especially dispassionately. People are quitting my subscription list in droves, calling me names, and sometimes just taunting me.

I was sort of a mess to begin with, but now I'm really sort of a mess.

And the poor girl makes one lousy mistake. "Yes," she says breezily, "it's a big mistake to ever do anything political."

It was a mistake, because it opens her up to a cold scoop of parental schploot.

"You know," I say to her. "Cynicism can be devastating, especially it when arises from experience."

Politics is Martin Luther King, women's rights, economic justice, freedom of speech, world peace -- what's so despicable about that?

Bullseye. She hates me now. And I think I just gave her instructions to go have experiences about which to be cynical. Just what every man wants to tell a young woman who is not his daughter. I am such a genius.

So I let her out at campus and head back through the downtown traffic. The radio is abuzz with poll results. Gore and Clinton appear to be on the outs with one another. Or maybe the report is a leak, so Gore can be simultaneously distanced from Clinton while benefiting from his support?

Politics this year is like  one of those David Mamet movies where you think you know what is going on, but in the end you are as puzzled, as a spectator, as any of the characters.

I got this email:

"Stick to your areas of expertise. Poetry, folk music, musing about your tumor. That's the stuff we like about your writing. (Oh yeah, we could use a new story about your dog too. It's been a while.) Or else I will lock you in a room with 10 government employees for the weekend. You'll come out with a head so soft you will never write again."

I know I have been spouting off, furiously, about my issue, which is that the news media have colluded with the dirty tricksters of the GOP to embed the notion in the American psyche that Al Gore is some kind of lying machine. They have a canonical list of about thirty whoppers, about everything from Love Canal to Love Story to dog medicine to inventing the Internet to meeting General Westmoreland in Vietnam.

The problem is, the accusations of lying are themselves lies. Don’t take my word for it. In each case, something was quoted out of context, and then the reporter runs with the lie, embellishes it with a detail or exaggeration of his or her own, and lays it out before the public as proof that Gore is a stone psychopath.

He's not a psychopath. He's a dork. You can't be both, and he is clearly the latter. A big knothead just yearning to run the United States like a big model train.

Maybe it is the brain tumor. They say the pressure can alter your personality.

Hey, I don’t blame the GOP. They’re just PR people, working an edge. Gore's people do the same thing. I blame the commentators who take this garbage and serve it up to their readers and viewers as if it were good wholesome eating.

Let me name a few names. Each of these reporters/commentators has deliberately misconstrued or embellished Gore's record, and passed it on as gospel, as proof that Gore is the liar:

Ceci Connolly, Richard Berke, Tim Russert, Cokie Roberts, Glen Johnson, Curtis Wilkie.  (For a more complete list, see Daily Howler at www.dailyhowler.com, a caustic but amusing  summary of the crimes of political journalists during the last two years.)

The list of malefactors is nearly endless because it includes every anchorperson who cocked an eye about Buddhist temples, and every editorialist who alludes vaguely to character issues. 

The worst offenders, of course, are the pundits with an obvious axe to grind, and not a ribbon of decency in their DNA: Dick Morris, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Gigot, Michael Kelly and Peggy Noonan. These are the same people who insisted that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. They spin remorselessly, contradicting themselves by the day -- and no one ever holds them to account. No wonder I want to be a columnist.

What is so bad about this stuff? It kills democracy. The press papered over George W. Bush's startling rise to power two years ago. At that time he had only four years of experience as the governor of a weak governor system. Prior to that, he ran a ball club he bought with family money. His career is the trail of a man of remarkably little seriousness. At Yale he was a cheerleader.

Bush isn't really the problem (although he's evil, you read it here first). He's just the moderate windowdressing the impeachment forces are using to get what they wanted all along.

Yet he has gotten a free pass from the press, at the same time that they threw up a roadblock of lies about him lying.  How hard would it have been for CBS or the Wall Street Journal to look at the transcript and acknowledge that it was in error claiming that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet?

Cyberscientist Vincent Cerf, who may truly be said to have helped "invent" the Internet, does give Gore great credit for seeing the potential for the concept, 25 years ago. If anything, we should be heaping praises on Gore for being foresighted. Instead, because of press collusion, it is a badge of shame to him.

And the spin goes on. Now the spin is that Gore blew a campaign he should have coasted to victory months ago. Again, his character is the rap. No mention of the roadblock set up with the cooperation of the press to prevent that victory. While Bush got the free ride, Gore had to waste two months doing minesweeping to free up his lane.

Democracy, according to the Federalist Papers, can only succeed with an informed populace. By all accounts, we are the most "informed" populace in the history of the world. Informed by corporate-sanitized truth. The truth advertisers are willing to appear alongside. The truth donors are willing to see put out there. The truth focus group research predicts we can stomach without splitting wide open. The truth that is so processed and so bland that two thirds of the electorate -- including the people who in many ways are our brightest, best hopes, our kids -- give up on it and wander away.

Oh, I know where the young woman in the car was coming from. Been there. And you feel so bad about your country, and what it's come to.

But it will all be over in a week, and all the anger and hurt and betrayal will be flushed away with a lusty crank of the Electoral College. And we can all simmer down and get those hopes we have, of a society in which everyone counts, and the interlocking elements of government and the private sector do their jobs, and tell the public the truth, and money is just something you buy stuff with, and not something that buys you, and your children, and your future, back under control.

Think I'll write something about my dog. If he'll let me.