Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [62]
“Whether things were done that were perhaps less gracious than should have been, it is not going to be what President Bush focuses on, nor will it be what his staff focuses on,” said the high-minded Fleischer, who continued to flog the story for weeks.
Meanwhile, media outlets were receiving leaks from anonymous Republican sources sickened by the most extensive sack of the White House since the War of 1812. “Trash was everywhere,” one told CNN. Phone and computer lines had been cut, expletive-ridden graffiti written on the walls, file cabinets glued shut, and pictures stolen. The Washington Times quoted a Matt Drudge story titled “White House Offices Left Trashed: Porn Bombs, Lewd Messages.”
Unlike Matt Drudge, I’ve never experienced a porn bombing. I can only imagine that a porn bomb is a form of “dirty bomb,” consisting of a conventional explosive surrounded by a thick coating of dirty books and pictures. When the bomb goes off, the filth, either images or bits of text, could contaminate schoolyards, churches, and even John Ashcroft’s morning prayer meeting.
In the first week after the story broke, Fox brought up the vandalism story thirteen times. Uber-conservative Grover Norquist told CNN that:
There have been reports coming out of the White House of damage up to $200,000. . . . There have been obscenities scrawled. People have called in and gotten answering machines with obscenities attached to them. There have been pornographic things in the computers, viruses in the computer. I got a call from somebody at the White House today who said, “You can’t call me back. Phone lines have been cut and damaged. I’ll try to reach you next week,” just in the context of doing business. And “I’ll give you my phone number but it won’t work.” I called in and it didn’t work. So there’s evidently been extensive damage. But I think while Bush—and he’s instructed his people to be very, very low-key on this because it really reflects very poorly on the presidency and the White House and the previous occupants, that it is important to document what happened because if you don’t take pictures of it, you don’t document it, we know the Clintons will deny it ever happened.
In fact, Fleischer assured the press that, while there was no investigation, “what we are doing is cataloguing that which took place.”
Of course, none of this horrible vandalism actually occurred. But Georgia firebrand congressman Bob Barr had not been clued in on the ruse. Outraged, he demanded an immediate investigation by Congress’s General Accounting Office.
Fourteen months later, this, the final investigation of the Clinton administration, yielded a 217-page report that found no damage to the White House nor to the Executive Office Building. “There is no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by employees of the Clinton administration.”
The White House had been damaged. But not by Bill Clinton. No, the vandals were Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer, and their lickspittles in the right-wing press. And while no shits were found, Grover Norquist could not have done more damage had he taken a dump in each of the White House’s 132 rooms.
The Bush administration had established its game plan. Pretend to stay above the fray; use surrogates to lie, attack, and discredit; then get the media to report it. And, parallel to the campaign to get the message out, there was a no-less-vigorous effort to keep certain messages in.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post incurred official disfavor by writing about the taboo subject of how much the President loves to lie. A prescient article in the fall of 2002 questioned several of the Bush’s overblown claims regarding an imminent Iraqi threat to America. In light of subsequent events (e.g., the fact that Saddam did not pose much of a military threat to Americans in Baghdad, let alone Cincinnati), one can see why Milbank aroused the ire of the White House press operation.
By withholding routine information