Pundits create their own version of reality

[CatWoman]

On his Web site, The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby has exhaustively chronicled how fictive scenarios about Al Gore and George W. Bush dominated the 2000 presidential election. The Beltway press consistently portrayed Gore as a big faker who made up self-aggrandizing tales about himself, while Bush was an “authentic” politician with a common touch. A gushing Bush profile in, yes, The New York Times set the tone early: “Nobody would ever mistake him for Vice President Gore.... His style is an amalgam of East and Southwest, Yale and the oil patch. Call him the Madras Cowboy.”

The “Madras Cowboy” line never took, but the theme sure did. I vividly recall talking with two Democratic friends, both physicians who are both a lot smarter than myself, who’d swallowed the anti-Gore story line whole—invented the Internet, “Love Story,” the lot. The first claim Gore never made; the second, author Erich Segal made clear, was largely true. He had modeled his novel’s protagonist on Gore, his former student.

The result is that our president’s a bicycle-pedaling “Texas rancher” who to my knowledge has never owned a horse or cow, and an epic prevaricator rivaled only by Richard Nixon and his fellow Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Many people find it hard to grasp how today’s Beltway press operates because, in their own professional lives, inventing or ignoring dispositive facts ultimately leads to firing, disgrace and revoked licenses. In Washington, it brings fame, fortune and guest spots on “Hardball,” where pundits ponder questions like this one from the excitable host about Sen. Hillary Clinton’s alleged unwillingness to explain her vote authorizing the Iraq war: “Everybody in America knew we were going to war with Bush. He made it pretty clear from Day One we were going to war. How come she still pretends that she didn’t know he was going to war ? It’s like she didn’t know anything about Bill and his behavior ! How many times is she going to be confused by men ?”

See how it works ? From weapons of mass destruction straight back to Bill Clinton’s pants. Never mind that when the Senate voted in 2002, Bush swore that war was the last thing he wanted. Did Hillary Clinton believe him ? I have no way of knowing. Her contemporaneous public statements accepted intelligence reports touting Iraq’s WMD or friendly relations with al-Qa’ida, both now highly questionable.

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/182519/

[DinahMoeHum]

1. No wonder the "Beltway" is often referred to as a "golden ghetto".

The pundits and pols don't talk to anyone except each other.

Especially on the the Sunday morning TV talk shows, which I call "circle-jerking".

:evilfrown: