Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [53]
—March 18, 2003
I mean the Democrats, I thought we would always would unite behind our troops with a pending conflict. And we have the Democratic leadership in the Senate daily attacking the President even now.
—March 19, 2003
You don’t have to take cheap political partisan shots at the commander in chief and say to the world that he doesn’t have the experience to lead when he is leading men and women into harm’s way.
—March 27, 2003
Here we are in a conflict, in a war, and the President is trying to direct things, and they just can’t put aside their partisanship for five minutes and support the troops and support the President, and these are the leaders of the Democratic Party.
—April 6, 2003
And a special shout-out to Colmes for never pointing out Hannity’s shameless hypocrisy.
The bombing campaign in Kosovo ended on June 10, 1999, with the signing of a peace accord. Milosevic was kicked out of Belgrade a few months later and sent to The Hague, where he’s now on trial for crimes against humanity. (I say “guilty.”) And as I pointed out in my joke to the troops, there was not one American combat casualty during the entire campaign.
Back again to Kosovo, 2001. Flying out in the Chinooks, they made us wear flak jackets and helmets, which always made me feel silly. But on the last trip, as we were headed over the Sars Mountains, the Chinook did a quick turn, then dived. The pilot was taking evasive action. I could see tracers coming at us. We were being shot at. My first thought was about the joke I had told and how funny it would be if I were our first combat fatality in Kosovo.
Ah, the mind of a trained comedian.
19
Who Created the Tone?
“Scumbag,” “sociopath,” “perpetual preener,” “rapist,” “unserious,” “craven miscreant.”1 Sound like anyone you know? I mean, besides Steven Seagal?2 Actually, it was the forty-second President of the United States, Bill Clinton, who was called all of these things. In my day, we never used such language to describe the President, unless he was a real asshole like Nixon.
Remember during the 2000 campaign how then Governor Bush kept saying he was going to “change the tone in Washington”? That really touched a nerve. The partisan rancor in D.C. had led millions of Americans to stop following politics and instead spend hours a day downloading pornography from the Internet.
Where did this malicious tone come from in the first place? I submit that it can be traced to a day in 1981, when billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife fielded a reporter’s question about his financial backing of conservative groups.
“You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here,” he said to Karen Rothmyer of the Columbia Journalism Review. He went on to tell her that she was ugly and that her teeth were “terrible.” Of Ms. Rothmyer’s mother, who was not present, he said, “She’s ugly, too.” Sensing that it was time to wrap up the interview, Ms. Rothmyer thanked Scaife for his time. He bade her farewell with a cheery “Don’t look behind you.”
That’s the funny thing about tone. It’s so subjective. Usually, I find it’s enough to call someone a “fucking Communist cunt,” without having to gild the lily by disparaging her teeth and issuing a veiled death threat.
But then again, the Wall Street Journal has never called me “the financial archangel for the [conservative] movement’s intellectual underpinnings.” In total, Scaife’s contribution to right-wing groups (more than a hundred of them) adds up to over $200 million dollars. That kind of money can buy a lot of tone. He’s given $35 million to the far-right Heritage Foundation, backed the Federalist Society (a secretive conservative legal organization which feeds Bush his ultraconservative judicial nominees and political appointees), and donated to the Cato Institute,