Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [70]
Add up your score. If you got four points, your political IQ is somewhere between 40 and 200. If you, like the editorial writers for the Wall Street Journal, got between zero and three points, your political IQ is between 0 and 39.
Dolphins are about a 36. But they’re cute. And friendly, too.
I think Paul Gigot, who has edited the WSJ’s editorial page since 2001, is kind of cute. Or, as he prefers, “handsome.” But, as I learned when I called to ask about this editorial, he is not friendly. I left a message, and, to his credit, Paul called me back. To his discredit, he refused to discuss the editorial. Even worse, he got angry and attacked me personally, impugning my motives.
“You just want to be able to say that you called Paul Gigot and that he couldn’t defend his editorial, so you can put it in your book to sell more copies,” he said.1
Frankly, I was hurt. Nobody had ever spoken to me that way before. My actual intention was totally innocent.
My purpose in calling Gigot was to discuss the editorial and, in a civil manner, find out why he chose to publish something so mind-blowingly asinine. I would have thought that he would have loved an opportunity to defend his work product against a mere comedian with only a passing knowledge of current events. Oh well.
Paul Gigot
One unfortunate result of Gigot’s intransigence was that he did not have the opportunity to address some other questions I had. Since the statistics cited in the editorial seemed to vindicate Clinton’s gun control policy, I had taken the liberty of having TeamFranken check out the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Brady Bill debate. The Brady Bill, which passed in late 1993 and took effect in early 1994, required background checks and a five-day waiting period for gun purchasers.
As I suspected, the Journal opposed Brady and the assault weapons ban. But what I wanted to talk to Gigot about was the tone of the anti–gun control editorials. For example, in their January 26, 1994, piece, the Journal wrote, “An awful lot of innocent Americans have had to be robbed, beaten, stabbed, raped, tortured, and murdered to arrive at the point where a Bill Clinton could feel compelled to get tough on crime.”
I hope I’m not being overly partisan in suggesting that this was maybe just the slightest bit unfair to Clinton, who ran on an anticrime platform, announced in his first State of the Union address his intention to put one hundred thousand more police on the street, and successfully fought to reduce crime every single year of his presidency.
The Journal’s December 10, 1993, editorial was no kinder to “liberals” in general: “To date, their outrage over violent deaths has been a pose.” Ouch! They nailed us there. I personally remember expressing mock outrage in 1993 over a brutal bludgeoning in Missouri I had read about. But I was really just posturing to make it seem like I was a decent person with actual feelings for human beings.
So what did the Journal editorial page say about gun control while it was being debated? In May of 1994, the editorial page wrote, “Democrats in Washington are bursting their buttons over two big contributions to the war on crime: Enacting the Brady Bill and voting in the House recently for a ban on ‘assault weapons.’ We’re not impressed.”
They spent most of the editorial questioning the feasibility and constitutionality of Brady and pointing out that “assault weapons” are “used in less than 1% of crime.”2
Then the Journal concluded with a challenge: “Democrats now think that with their bans they have ‘done something’ about crime. We hope someone will be keeping score on the results.”
Well, someone did keep score. And that score was presented in the shit-for-brains 2003 editorial: “Gun violence has declined from 12% of violent crime in 1993 to 9% in the most recent