Truth - Al Franken [6]
The next morning’s Wall Street Journal ran an editorial titled “The Bush Mandate” proclaiming that “Mr. Bush has been given the kind of mandate that few politicians are ever fortunate enough to receive.” Of course, The Wall Street Journal editorial page had also implied that Bill Clinton had murdered Arkansas teenagers by running them over with a train,5 a claim even more outlandish than the Bush mandate fabrication.
As depressing as it was to see the hacky right-wing hackocracy fall into hackstep—and very depressing it was—I expected this kind of thing from them. I could take it. I could steel my stomach because I knew that my fellow travelers in the Mainstream Media wouldn’t buy it either.
With that in mind, I turned from the Journal to the website of that liberal standard bearer, TIME magazine. Uh oh:
This time, of course, his claim of a popular mandate is incontrovertible.
Upsetting—but maybe this was just a fluke. TIME magazine, while very liberal, would sometimes feint rightward to fool the suits upstairs. It had been feinting rightward for almost seventy-five years. But I knew I could find a levelheaded, liberal assessment in the pages of the reliably lefty Jew York Times.
Wrong again. David Sanger was toeing the party line all right. The wrong party. “Mr. Bush no longer has to pretend that he possesses a clear electoral mandate. Because for the first time in his presidency he can argue that he has the real thing.” I appreciated Mr. Sanger acknowledging Bush’s four-year record of pretending he had won in 2000. But it seemed to me that Mr. Sanger had drunk the pretend Kool-Aid.
My head spinning, I turned to Doyle McManus and Janet Hook of the Los Angeles Times. No liberal dice. They used a similar “now Bush doesn’t have to pretend anymore” formulation:
Four years ago, George W. Bush won his first term with fewer votes than his opponent, but governed as if the nation had granted him a clear mandate to pursue conservative policies. This time, Bush can claim a solid mandate of 51% of the vote, which made him the first presidential candidate to win a clear majority since 1988—a point Bush aides made repeatedly Wednesday.
The Bush strategy that McManus and Hook pointed out (claiming that 51 percent was a solid mandate) had obviously worked with McManus and Hook. It was true that in ’96, Clinton had received only 49.24 percent of the popular vote—short of the 50.01 percent necessary for a clear majority, much less the 50.73 percent racked up by George W. But Clinton had been in a three-way race with the late (?) Ross Perot. No well-funded third-party candidate had run in 2004, despite the best efforts of Republicans to pump up Ralph Nader. And Clinton received 379 electoral votes. Bush had won 286.
I was getting sick. Where was the liberal media in my hour of greatest need? Maybe I had been right in my last book, Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, even without meaning to be. Maybe there really isn’t such a thing as the liberal media. Is this why my last book was so successful? Because I had hit upon, entirely by chance, a hidden, but profound, truth about the American political scene?
There was only one way to find out. I turned to CNN, which Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had so aptly described as the Communist News Network. Ah, there was Wolf Blitzer, a loyal foot soldier in the left-wing media army. What’s he saying? He was talking about Bush. “He’s going to say he’s got a mandate from the American people, and by all accounts he does.”
By all accounts? So CNN was on their side, too. The darkness overwhelmed me. If CNN, the LA Times, The Jew York Times, and TIME magazine were all claiming that George “21⁄2 percent” W. “Smallest Margin in History” Bush had a mandate, then it was just Air America alone on the left. Air America, and, it goes without saying, National Politburo