Truth - Al Franken [59]
When he wrote the anonymous memo, Darling was serving his country as a staffer for Florida freshman Senator Mel Martinez. Perhaps aware of his boss’s habit of blaming his staffers for the over-the-top ugliness that seemed to stream forth from his campaigns,2 Darling kept his mouth shut during the weeks-long “fake memo” fake scandal ginned up by his kinsmen in the right-wing media.
In the days and weeks that followed, Brit Hume, Tucker Carlson, and even Rush Limbaugh all cast doubt on the memo’s authenticity, developing Hinderaker’s already airtight case by citing such further evidence of its phoniness as “creepy phrases” and “misspellings.”
The funniest new piece of evidence deployed against the memo was that it closely mirrored the previously acknowledged work of Republican Senator Mel Martinez. Here’s Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard:
True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, “The Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act.” This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part—it didn’t come from Martinez—left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo’s life, ill-motivated in the extreme.
Republicans? Callous, cynical, ill-motivated in the extreme? The memo had to be a fraud!
Soon the mainstream media had been suckered into reporting on the “controversy.” Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz puzzled that “while there is no hard evidence that the memo is fake, there are several strange things about it, including the basic fact that no one seems to know who wrote it.” When Brian Darling read that line in the Post that morning, he probably sprayed his coffee in that funny way they do in comedy movies.
And Rush? Well, he was Rush. As hard as the others might try, no one could match Limbaugh’s perfectly executed triple Axel. Here he is on March 24:
It was forged! The memo was made up by Democrat staffers. . . . So it is clear that the Democrats wanted to politicize this and make the Republicans look like they were politicizing Terri Schiavo, and pandering. Why would the Democrats do this? Because they’re scared of this issue.
And he lands it!
Of course, when Darling was finally exposed on April 7 and forced to resign, there was no wave of resignations from the right-wing media, though Tucker Carlson’s show was soon canceled for other reasons.
While the right-wing media were trying to prove that Republicans weren’t trying to politicize the Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was focused on a different aspect of the story. The politics.
Tom DeLay, as you may remember, was in a lot of hot water over what some people call “ethics violations.” He had recently been reprimanded three times by the House Ethics Committee, and the media were beginning to realize that DeLay might not be just a little bit corrupt, but very, very corrupt. Even the unblinkingly partisan Wall Street Journal editorial page would write that DeLay had “an odor” to him, an “unsavory whiff” of Beltway corruption that “sooner or later [would] sweep him out” of office if he didn’t reform.
To DeLay, Schiavo was literally a godsend—the kind of explosive hot-button issue that could instantly swing the spotlight away from his accelerating implosion. On March 18, DeLay told the Family Research Council:
I tell you,