FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2012
We hope you’ll be able to help: Just like that, we’re half-way through our third non-annual fund-raising drive!
In the past few days, we’ve seen the war that’s being conducted about our recent history.
In Wednesday morning’s Washington Post, Melinda Henneberger wrote this piece. The headline, right on page A2: “Let’s not give Romney the Al Gore treatment.”
Can we talk? The vast bulk of the public has never heard that there’s any such thing as “the Al Gore treatment!” That very same day, Jacob Weisberg posted this horrible piece at Slate, trying to keep them deceived. (For fuller treatment, see post beow.)
Henneberger started telling a secret about her own guild’s past misconduct. Weisberg is working very hard to keep you barefoot and clueless.
In our view, future generations will need to know the history of the Clinton-Gore years. They will need to read and understand Gene Lyons’ Fools for Scandal. They will need to read and understand Lyons and Conason’s The Hunting of the President.
They will also need to understand what happened in the war against Gore. That twenty-month war sent Bush to the White House.
The future deserves to know.
If we were rolling in dough, we wouldn’t ask. But we aren’t, and we hope you’ll consider a contribution. If you’re feeling suggestible today, you know what to do: Just click this.
Over at our companion site, our newly-posted Chapter 6 describes the Love Canal episode of December 1999. During that astonishing episode, the theme that Candidate Gore was a LIAR hardened, then turned to stone. Chris Matthews played a leading role in this episode, as he did in so many others.
Today, his keister is kissed by corporate players—by people who tell you they’re working hard on your high-minded “liberal” team.
We’ll only suggest that you read Chapter 6, with many disgraces to follow. This is the way George Bush reached the White House.
The future will need to know.
It's funny how they all start to feel strange about the "Al Gore treatment" when it's a GOP candidate. Then seem so capable of withholding their personal feelings. That kind of delayed satisfaction must be killing them inside. Maybe they're looking forward to a medicare voucher someday, so the delay will all be worth it.
ReplyDeleteI just donated and you should, too!
ReplyDeleteBob, it's a good blog. Your insights and independence are appreciated. But the ongoing obsession over Gore is just boring.
ReplyDeleteAnd because what they did to Gore was about 1% as bad as what they did to Palin, it looks partisan, irrelevant, dated and weak.
Comparing the Gore treatment to Palin is insulting. Palin lacked *any* credentials, educational or experience-related, for the job of vice-president. Mostly the press simply had to run video of her press events. Saturday Night Live ran direct quotes to satirize her. Palin did the job on herself.
ReplyDeletePalin was a governor. Obama served 1/4 of one term in the US senate.
DeleteThe other anonymous picked a bad example in Palin, but he's correct that the press ridicule heaped on Gore doesn't make him an outlier, especially for a Democrat. You think the press was fairer to Clinton or Kerry, let alone Barack Obama?
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, the press was fairer (to be fair, one would say the press was "less unfair") to candidates Clinton, Kerry, and Obama.
ReplyDeleteThe press was atrocious to Michael Dukakis, too. But I think Bob is right about the uniqueness of the Gore treatment, because it wasn't only "this guy is uncomfortable and boring" or "this gaffe is going to cost him" (which have been dragging down candidates for decades). It also involved a series of lies about and misinterpretations of his statements that created a bandwagon effect that compounded one unfairness on top of the next.
ReplyDeleteThe press treated Gore worse than Clinton? Have I forgotten the press's brouhaha about Gore's nonexistent real-estate scandal, bimbo eruptions, murdering a member of his brain trust, rape rumors, his wife's hairstyle, a travel-office "scandal," or the word "slick" becoming part of his nickname? Or maybe the media's publicizing Gore's elitist love of windsurfing, making fun of his efforts to seem blue-collar by hunting and liking NASCAR, lying about his military heroism, or being dominated by his rich, foreign-ish wife? Or the press flap about Gore's being a non-American Muslim socialist terrorism appeaser whose wife hates white people, who acts professorial, can't speak without a teleprompter, plays the race card 24-7 and who endorses his ex-minister's contempt for the United States?
ReplyDeleteOh, but Gore was said to fib about "Love Story" and the internets and be a wooden campaigner. How horrible.
ReplyDeleteGore is the most serious case because of the consequences Bush went to the White House We're still recovering from that
ReplyDeleteThe lies the press told about Gore (or Clinton) are trivial compared to the lies the press told and continues to tell and will always tell, about the world and American conduct in it; lies in which both Clinton and Gore were complicit and are still complicit.
ReplyDeleteStrange, that we'd be so obsessed with personal coverage, but aren't troubled in the least by the fiction presented to us daily, called "news".
The conduct can be outrageous; remember the networks' refusal to report that their "independent" Pentagon consultants were all on the Pentagon payroll and coordinating propaganda strategies?
In this kind of a culture, who the hell cares what they're saying about candidates?
"The lies the press told about Gore (or Clinton) are trivial compared to the lies the press told and continues to tell and will always tell, about the world and American conduct in it; lies in which both Clinton and Gore were complicit and are still complicit."
Delete>>> this may seem an apeealing argument on the surface but how much persoanl political capital of the dem office holders did the lies destroy? how better might world events have gone had they not been as badly defamed back at home? and how better might things have gone internationally had more dems been elected?
You're absolutely right, Anonymous, the lies told about Mr. Gore were indeed trivial, especially compared to the lies told about the world and American conduct in it. In fact, that is a valuable lesson in the susceptibility of the American voter, who is prone to ignore or dismiss American conduct in the world while dwelling on the absurd and trivial.
ReplyDeleteBut of your laundry list on Mr. Clinton, may I point out that the majority of those absurd and trivial characterizations of Clinton arose after he was elected. And, as far as the characterizations of Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry, at least in those cases the Corporate media were frequently pointing out that these were allegations and not facts - and in many cases clearly and repeatedly refuted them. In Mr. Gore's case, the Corporate media were directly involved in making them up and popularizing them, and virtually no one was refuting them.
Our mutual friend Mr. Somerby takes great pains to exhaustively demonstrate that the "War Against Gore" was waged not by the right-wing media, but by our erstwhile Media of Record, the so-called "Liberal" Media. A similar argument in the case of the more contemporary candidates holds no water.
Although Gore was wrongly blamed for a number of issues, the media never held him to task for his nonsense about a "Social Security lockbox." In reality, there is no such thing. It was a nice-sounding phrase without any meaning.
ReplyDeleteIronically, if "Social Security lockbox" were to mean anything, it would be something like George Bush's partial privatization proposal. That approach would have specfic assets guaranteeing part of one's Social Security benefits, a feature that doesn't exist in the current SS system.
Yeah!
DeleteThe real meaning of what Gore said is to do what Bush said, which would result in what David_in_CA says -- makes perfect sense!
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