Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [63]
It wasn’t just the White House. Over at the Pentagon, tough guy Donald Rumsfeld knew how to court-martial a nosy reporter. “This is by far the worst it’s ever been,” said Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, a ten-year veteran of the Pentagon beat. When Ricks asked why he had been excluded from a trip on which American journalists were allowed to cover a Special Forces operation for the first time, a press affairs officer told him: “We don’t like your stories, and we don’t like the questions you’ve been asking.”
Since that incident, the only question Ricks has asked is “What kind of story would you like to see in the Washington Post tomorrow?”
A top news executive at one of the three major networks who spoke with me through an intermediary on the condition of anonymity for both of them and who insisted that I give no distinguishing information about him or her, said off the record, “This is the most cowed White House press corps in history.”
Those early months were heady days for George W. Bush. Emboldened by his landslide victory, Bush passed a $1.6 trillion tax cut which went primarily to the rich, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, delayed rules that would reduce acceptable levels of arsenic in the drinking water, and implemented the enormously successful Operation Ignore.
Ironically, it took a man of Bush’s own party to bring his extended honeymoon to a close. Jim Jeffords, an obscure senator from a little known state called “Vermont,” had been on the receiving end of a series of petty slights, provoked by his bothersome habit of voting his conscience. To punish Jeffords, the cagey Karl Rove had decided not to invite him to a White House ceremony honoring one of Jeffords’s own constituents, Michele Forman of Middlebury, as the Teacher of the Year.
Boy, did that backfire! As I can tell you from experiences with my wife’s family, and particularly her Uncle Ray, New Englanders are a singularly cranky and short-tempered group of people. Not being invited to a Teacher of the Year ceremony is just the type of thing that would piss them off. Jeffords quit the Republican Party, throwing control of the Senate to the Democrats.
Emboldened by Jeffords’s example, the Washington press corps suddenly found its pecker again. Stories critical of Bush’s handling of the Teacher of the Year ceremony, of the secret Cheney energy task force, and of the President’s interminable vacations, began to appear not just in the German media, but in some American papers as well.
Suddenly on the defensive, Karl Rove counterattacked with a series of photo ops of the President reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to kindergartners. Which is exactly what he was doing when Operation Ignore came to an abrupt and disastrous conclusion.
After being chased around the country by imaginary terrorists for nine hours, Bush returned to Washington and addressed a jittery nation. Far from comforting the American people, the President, who appeared to be genuinely terrified himself, further unsettled the country by stammering through a pallid and perfunctory statement.
Nine days later, having overcome his panic, the President capped an astonishing recovery by delivering an inspiring speech to a joint session of Congress. It was only in retrospect that I realized that the skillfully crafted address contained the seeds of a Manichean view that divides the world into good and evil. Us and them. Black and white. American and “other.”
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the American people put aside their differences over, for instance, whether cutting a billion dollars from the Environmental Protection Agency was a good idea or not, and got behind our president—as well we should have. After winning a swift victory in Afghanistan with Bill Clinton’s military, Bush’s approval rating shot up to an unprecedented 112 percent.
The media’s testicles