WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2012
History should be recorded: For the third time in fourteen years, we’ve launched our annual fund-raising drive.
We wouldn’t ask if there wasn’t a need. We hope you’ll consider supporting our ongoing project—the history project which is unfolding at our companion site, How He Got There.
To do so, what the heck: Just click here.
How did George W. Bush reach the White House? Your major elites are quite determined to avoid discussing this question. In the process, a decade of press corps misconduct is getting swept out to sea.
Newt still gets to scream and yell. The real history keeps getting lost.
The Clinton-Gore years were a time of growing conservative power in Washington. This fact was rather plainly expressed in the press corps’ rolling misconduct. In March 1999, the pseudo-scandals of the Clinton years gave way to the coverage of Candidate Gore. Twenty months of press corps misconduct sent George W. Bush to the White House.
The press corps no longer functions in the way it functioned during that period. But that history should be recorded—and the press corps will never do it.
We’ve recently posted Chapter 6 at our companion site. (To read Chapter 6, just click here). It describes the punishing Love Canal episode, which may have been the pivotal episode in all of Campaign 2000. But that episode occurred in December 1999. Eleven more months of gong-show behavior were yet to occur at that point.
We think this history should be recorded. The participants will never do so.
Over at How He Got There, we will! And so, for the third time in fourteen years, we make our yearly request.
While I agree with Bob that the media woefully mistreated Al Gore, I don't agree that Clinton's scandals were "pseudo". It has nothing to do with Clinton. If any President had been proved to have received oral sex in the oval office while conducting official business, that would have been a stupendous scandal. At the companies where I worked, I think that if the CEO had behaved as Clinton did, he'd have been fired.
ReplyDelete(Of course, now that Clinton has established a precedent, getting blow jobs in the oval office wouldn't be treated that seriously.)
Clinton's perjury was, of course, a felony.
Now, one can make a good case that neither of these misdeeds merited being removed from office. But, I cannot see how they can be called anything but real scandals.
Actually, one can make a good case that neither "misdeed" (adultery or lying about adultery) merited investigation at all.
DeleteAnd of course you pretend not to know that the pseudo-scandals to which Somerby refers have nothing to do with Clinton's sex life: Travelgate, Whitewater, supposed involvement in various murders, "trashing" the White House -- these are the phoney-baloney scandals we grown-ups are talking about.
If I wasn't struggling to pay my rent I would donate. Keep up the good work though.
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