Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [19]
Gore actually did conduct the first hearings on Love Canal. And in order to conduct these hearings, he not only showed up at them, but showed up at them every day. Plus, Gore wasn’t using the hearings as a way to dodge the draft. Compare this to Bush’s stint in the Air National Guard. In his autobiography, A Charge to Keep, Bush claims to have flown with his unit until 1973. But in a blow to Lady Truth, it seems that after getting Dad’s help to pass over the poor slobs waiting in line for a safe spot protecting Texas from the Viet Cong, Bush managed to skip out on much of his duty. Assigned in May 1972 to the Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron in Montgomery, Bush had a perfect attendance record. Perfectly bad. Base commander Brigadier General William Turnipseed says of Bush that he is “dead-certain he didn’t show up.”
Regarding Love Story, at no time during that controversy did Gore ever get arrested for drunk driving. The contrast to Bush’s 1976 arrest for drunk driving couldn’t be more stark. More damaging still is the bold-faced lie Bush told reporter Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News months before the drunk driving arrest had been disclosed. According to Slater, their conversation went like this. I think you’ll agree, it’s unambiguous.
SLATER: Governor, were you ever arrested after 1968?
BUSH: No.
The drunk driving thing uncaged a whole zoo full of lyin’. Here’s a good one from Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes, fielding reporters’ questions minutes after the announcement of Bush’s unfortunate past as a drunk driver. I’ve added numbers to Karen’s response for easy reference.
QUESTION: Do you know why he was stopped, Karen? Was he driving erratically or anything?
KAREN HUGHES: I believe they—I don’t know exactly, no. I
don’t know. There was no—there was no incident—
there’s—I don’t know exactly. There was some discussion
that he appeared to have been driving too slow—too slowly.
The real answer? Bush was arrested because he drove into a hedge. That’s what the arresting officer, Calvin Bridges, a former Kennebunkport policeman, told Portland, Maine’s Fox-51 reporter Erin Fehlau the day the story broke. According to Fehlau, Bridges said that “he spotted Bush driving erratically . . . [and] says Bush ran off the road into some hedges.”
Let’s try to get into Karen’s head, shall we? First off, it’s pretty apparent that she didn’t know. I derived that from the “I don’t know exactly, no” (line 1), the “I don’t know” (2), and the “I don’t know exactly” (3). Why did she say this three times? I think she was stalling while her savvy political mind weighed the implications: Hmmm. Drunk driving? Bad. What’s wrong with drunk driving? Kill people. People dead. Very bad. What would be the least deadly way to drive drunk? Erratically? No. Too fast? NO!!! Too slow? Yes! Too slow. That’s it. “There was some discussion that he appeared to have been driving too slow—too slowly.” That’s good.
The media dutifully picked up on this, even following her line of reasoning. As a columnist in the Washington Times wrote: “As for Mr. Bush, it may be revealing that he was not speeding like so many people driving under the influence of alcohol, but was in fact, pulled over by the police because he was driving too slowly.”
Great job, Karen!
And then there’s the cocaine.
Back in 1979, the week after the release of radiation at Three Mile Island, I wrote a Saturday Night Live sketch with Tom Davis and Jim Downey called “The Amazing Colossal President.” President Carter visits a nuclear plant during an “event,” is irradiated, and grows to enormous size. At a press conference, a reporter asks the spokesman for the nuclear plant, “Is it true the President is over a hundred feet tall?”
“No, absolutely not! That is untrue!” the spokesman says indignantly.
“Is it true the President is over ninety feet tall?” asks another reporter.
“No comment.”
You didn’t have to be a genius to know that the Amazing Colossal President was somewhere between ninety and a hundred feet tall.
In the same way, it didn’t take a genius