Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [81]
Peggy promised to look at the website and call me back if she had anything to add. Now if you yourself go to the website and watch the infamous, almost inaudible booing, you might think that Peggy “20,000 people” Noonan would have called back to apologize for her misrepresentation. And she did. No, she didn’t. She’s awful.
Next call was to Christopher Caldwell, the Weekly Standard author of the “20,000 booed a succession of people” quote. Caldwell had written on behalf of the editors to give the official Weekly Standard take on the memorial.
He said that viewers “tuned in on television to watch a solemn commemoration and found a rally devoted to a politics that was twisted, pagan, childish, inhumane, and even totalitarian beyond their worst nightmares.”
He compared Kahn’s speech to “a Maoist reeducation camp,” a “sinister incident, unexampled in recent American politics.” He labeled the crowd a “mob.” He said that “one of our major political parties, or at least a sizable wing of it, appeared to be dancing a jig on the grave of a particularly beloved fallen comrade.”
“Most of those who watched this spectacle,” Caldwell wrote authoritatively, “felt a disgust bordering on shame.”
Huh. Why did he say “most of those” instead of “most of us”? Probably a question of style.
More bizarrely and libelously, Caldwell wrote, “The pilots and aides who died with him were barely treated at all.” That was just crazy. There were long, beautiful eulogies about each of the aides. In fact, the speeches about Paul didn’t start until nearly three hours into the broadcast. A friend who had watched on TV told me, “I was wondering when they would get to Paul already.” (Yes, my friend is Jewish.)
How could Caldwell have overlooked the first three hours? It was all so puzzling. But then a question occurred to me. Tucker hadn’t seen the memorial before he talked about it on national TV. Peggy, it seemed anyway, hadn’t actually seen Trent Lott get booed. And as TeamFranken was researching this chapter, the whole nastiness with Jayson Blair hit The New York Times. Blair, as you will remember, was busted for making things up about events he hadn’t actually seen. Could it be, I wondered, that Caldwell, writing on behalf of the editors of one of America’s preeminent conservative journals, hadn’t even seen the memorial?
Caldwell called me back. I asked him about the “pagan” characterization. Had he seen the ecumenical prayer at the beginning? No. I asked him about the “crowd of 20,000 booing.” Had he seen that? No. How about the eulogies for the aides? Had he seen any of those? No.
“What did you see?” I asked him.
“I saw it on TV.”
“On TV? Did you see it live?”
“No.”
“Did you see a replay of it on C-SPAN?”
“No. Listen, I hate to sound like I’m trying to get off the phone, but I’m on deadline.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Thanks for calling back. Tell you what. When you need to get off, just tell me, and we’ll end it there for now.”
“Okay.”
“So, did you see a tape of it?”
“No. I saw it on TV.”
“On TV. What does that mean?”
“I saw it on TV.”
“So . . . you saw clips of it on TV shows?”
“Yes.”
“That’s it? That’s all you saw?”
“Listen. I got to go. I have two deadlines.”
“Okay. Thanks. Good luck with your deadlines. One last thing, though.”
“Sure.”
“Your magazine is called the Weekly Standard. Doesn’t that mean you should have high standards?”
“Actually, the ‘Standard’ refers to a flag or banner, you know, to rally around.”
“Yeah. But I’ll bet they come from the same root word.”
“You’re probably right. But I got to go.”
“Okay. Thanks again. I’ll call you.”
“Sure.”
That’s the last I heard from him. I called him the next day, and then every business day for the next two weeks. He must have been in a real crunch on a book or something.
Clearly, Caldwell had written his entire piece based on the most damaging moments of the memorial: five-to-ten-second clips of Rick Kahn, and the one political moment from Paul’s son