Campaign watch: Gene Lyons recalls how it all began!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2016

This week's essential column: Do you plan to vote for Candidate Sanders? If so, that's fine with us.

Do you plan to vote for Candidate Clinton? If so, that's OK too.

What follows isn't an attempt to assess Clinton v. Sanders. What follows is a chance for you to ponder the journalistic history of the past twenty-plus years.

We're recommending Gene Lyons' new column at The National Memo. If you read only one column this week, we'll suggest that you read his.

Lyons is author of the 1996 book, Fools For Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater. In 2000, he teamed with Joe Conason to write The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Those books are essential histories of the mainstream press corps' strange behavior toward the Clintons during the 1990s. In this morning's column, Lyons recalls a major incident in 1994 in which the press corps began inventing a punishing theme—the notion that Hillary Clinton is a fiendish liar.

Some of us simply won't believe that Lyons' account could be accurate. Until Frank Rich says it's OK to say it, we will simply refuse to believe that any such thing could have happened.

From our own perspective, we'll only say this:

In Lyons' column, he describes the way the press corps invented a lie by Hillary Clinton. Here at this site, we spent years chronicling the way those same people invented lies by Candidate Gore.

We learned one important fact in the utterly fruitless years we spent on that topic. We liberals are cowards and ditto-heads, the emptiest type of camp followers. Here's how it works in our world:

Frank Rich has never said that the press invented lies by Gore, so we the liberals aren't able to say it. We liberals only say the things our tribal elders give us permission to say, and our tribal elders are the very ones who invented the lies which sent George Bush to the White House.

Why did our elders behave that way? We have no idea, in large part because no one has ever asked them. Beyond that, no one ever will! Have you heard of the code of silence? We self-impressed liberals have accepted that code day after day after day.

The story-line which ran through Gore was being invented in 1994. Lyons describes one high-profile incident, but because he isn't Frank Rich, we'll never believe that it happened as he describes or ask ourselves what it might mean.

We love to trash the ditto-heads. But crackers, please! Just look around! The ditto-heads are us!