Remember when the Bush drunk driving story came out right before Election 2000?

[bluestateguy]

Governor Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in 1976, but his campaign never saw fit to just own up to it to the media early in the campaign to get it out of the way. The lazy news media certainly never bothered to check into it, even though Bush was well known to be a boozing party animal until he was at least 40. Nor was there much of a blogosphere back then either.

As it happened, an ordinary citizen named Tom Connolly in Maine was resourceful enough to to do the hard work of going through public records to find out that indeed, this tough talking "law and order" politician had covered up a drunken driving conviction.

Well, then the media ran with it, and the story caused Bush some embarrassment, helping to put Al Gore over the top to win the election.* But then there was Fox News's coverage of the story. For them, the fact that our possible next president was a drunken driver was a mere afterthought, a sideshow, an ancillary element. To Fox, the REAL story was "hey, who is the an eccentric man who dug up George W. Bush's arrest record? What's the skinny on him? What are his motives?" Fox made Connolly the story with a very accusatory undercurrent, while Bush's drunk driving was deemed to be of little relevance.


*You know what I mean here.

[Orrex]

1. Timely.

[grasswire]

2. that whole episode was a Rove op

And you forgot part of it.

That afternoon Senator Bob Kerrey had called a press conference to challenge George W. Bush to explain his absences from the Texas Air National Guard. This story would have ruined the Bush campaign.

Rove was prepared for this challenge.

A local FOX affiliate broke the story of the DUI. The national media jumped on the DUI and obliterated the AWOL story.

I'm sure that Karl Rove went to bed a very happy man that night. And it's not the only time that deflection of a bad story was achieved by breaking a less damaging bad story.

[Bitwit1234]

3. But the media never ever even posted anything about the woman

who filed a sexual harassment and stalking lawsuit against Bush. I know it was true, cause before it was deleted from the Texas Civil Law Suit bulletin listing I saw the suit. They didn't put what was in the suit just the headlines of what was filed. After Bush won the nomination it disappeared. And the woman filing the suit was conveniently said to have committed suicide. That was after four guys showed up at her doorstep, beat her husband almost to death and told her she'd be next if she didn't drop the suit. About six weeks later is when she was said to have committed suicide. This was the same woman when she was a girl went to school with Bush. Some said she was his girl friend. Well she got beat up then also, she had a miscarriage and took off from school and the state of
Texas. She came back as a married lady some thirty years later and this all happened. None but one newspaper ran with the story and that only lasted a week. They didn't mention other than the lawsuit about Bush.

[Hydra]

4. Good reminders

Like dust swept under the rug, people like her and the DC Madame "commit Suicide" with a lot of help, and it all disappears...