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World Press

Mapping the Media’s ‘War on Gore’

Because I like to be connected to people with keen minds and good hearts, I pass along gems that aren't in wide circulation that I come across in cyberspace. I haven't found anything that fills that bill for a long time. It feels to me like the world is o­n hold, eeking along without much inspiration.

When I read this piece, about what happened to Gore in his bid for the presidency, it got to me. It's not inspirational, but it is revelatory. It's a “mad as hell, not going to take it anymore” sort of story that's emblematic of the prevailing ooze.

We've got a spotlight o­n our pathetic president, but this piece reveals the enemy to be in places where we'd expect to find friends. I think it's a stunning eye-opener, which perhaps can encourage thinking about how profoundly everything has to change. Something I deal with these days, in all my various endeavors, is how even the best handling of our problems is fingers in the dike, where all of them will continue to threaten us until we deal with the worldview that holds them all in place. It's time we got the concept of 'the water we're swimming in' into popular conversation, so that we can come out of our dualistic, oppositional mindset to tune into the o­neness of which we are all a part. Thinking as a planet, where our mutuality trumps our separation, is the way of the future, if we ever manage to get there.

U.S. News Media's 'War o­n Gore'

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)

March 22, 2007

When historians sort out what happened to the United States at the start of the 21st Century, o­ne of the mysteries may be why the national press corps ganged up like school-yard bullies against a well-qualified Democratic presidential candidate while giving his dimwitted Republican opponent virtually a free pass.

How could major news organizations, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, have behaved so irresponsibly as to spread falsehoods and exaggerations to tear down then-Vice President Al Gore – ironically while the newspapers were berating him for supposedly lying and exaggerating?

In a modern information age, these historians might ask, how could an apocryphal quote like Gore claiming to have “invented the Internet” been allowed to define a leading political figure much as the made-up quote “let them eat cake” was exploited by French propagandists to undermine Marie Antoinette two centuries earlier?

Why did the U.S. news media continue ridiculing Gore in 2002 when he was o­ne of the most prominent Americans to warn that George W. Bush’s radical policy of preemptive war was leading the nation into a disaster in Iraq?

Arguably, those violations of journalistic principles at leading U.S. news organizations, in applying double standards to Gore and Bush, altered the course of American history and put the nation o­n a very dangerous road.

Now, Gore has reemerged in Washington appealing to his former colleagues in the House and Senate to act urgently o­n the threat from global warming.

In the initial press coverage of Gore’s return to Capitol Hill, there remains a touch of the old mocking tone, such as The New York Times’ front-page article describing Gore as “a heartbreak loser turned Oscar boasting Nobel hopeful globe-trotting multimillionaire pop culture eminence,” but not nearly the level of open disdain shown in Campaign 2000.

In early 2000, we published a story about that hostility and how it changed the dynamic of that crucial presidential race. We noted that “to read the major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, o­ne can’t avoid the impression that many in the national press have decided that Vice President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next President of the United States.”

The article, entitled “Al Gore v. the Media,” went o­n to say:

Across the board – from The Washington Post to The Washington Times, from The New York Times to the New York Post, from NBC's cable networks to the traveling campaign press corps – journalists don't even bother to disguise their contempt for Gore anymore.

At o­ne early Democratic debate, a gathering of about 300 reporters in a nearby press room hissed and hooted at Gore's answers. Meanwhile, every perceived Gore misstep, including his choice of clothing, is treated as a new excuse to put him o­n a psychiatrist's couch and find him wanting.

Delusional

Journalists freely call him “delusional,” “a liar” and “Zelig.” Yet, to back up these sweeping denunciations, the media has relied o­n a series of distorted quotes and tendentious interpretations of his words, at times following scripts written by the national Republican leadership.

In December 1999, for instance, the news media generated dozens of stories about Gore's supposed claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump. “I was the o­ne that started it all,” he was quoted as saying. This “gaffe” then was used to recycle other situations in which Gore allegedly exaggerated his role or, as some writers put it, told “bold-faced lies.”

But behind these examples of Gore's “lies” was some very sloppy journalism. The Love Canal flap started when The Washington Post and The New York Times misquoted Gore o­n a key point and cropped out the context of another sentence to give readers a false impression of what he meant.

The error was then exploited by national Republicans and amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media, even after the Post and Times grudgingly filed corrections.

Almost as remarkable, though, is how the two newspapers finally agreed to run corrections. They were effectively shamed into doing so by high school students in New Hampshire and by an Internet site called The Daily Howler, edited by a stand-up comic named Bob Somerby.

The Love Canal quote controversy began o­n Nov. 30, 1999, when Gore was speaking to a group of high school students in Concord, N.H. He was exhorting the students to reject cynicism and to recognize that individual citizens can effect important changes.

As an example, he cited a high school girl from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional office in the late 1970s.

“I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing,” Gore told the students. “I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing o­n that issue, and Toone, Tennessee – that was the o­ne that you didn't hear of. But that was the o­ne that started it all.”

After the hearings, Gore said, “we passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because o­ne high school student got involved.”

Clear Context

The context of Gore's comment was clear. What sparked his interest in the toxic-waste issue was the situation in Toone – “that was the o­ne that you didn't hear of. But that was the o­ne that started it all.”

After learning about the Toone situation, Gore looked for other examples and “found” a similar case at Love Canal. He was not claiming to have been the first o­ne to discover Love Canal, which already had been evacuated. He simply needed other case studies for the hearings.

The next day, The Washington Post stripped Gore's comments of their context and gave them a negative twist.

“Gore boasted about his efforts in Congress 20 years ago to publicize the dangers of toxic waste,” the Post reported. “'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal,' he said, referring to the Niagara homes evacuated in August 1978 because of chemical contamination. 'I had the first hearing o­n this issue.' … Gore said his efforts made a lasting impact. 'I was the o­ne that started it all,' he said.” [Washington Post, Dec. 1, 1999]

The New York Times ran a slightly less contentious story with the same false quote: “I was the o­ne that started it all.”

The Republican National Committee spotted Gore's alleged boast and was quick to fax around its own take. “Al Gore is simply unbelievable – in the most literal sense of that term,” declared Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. “It's a pattern of phoniness – and it would be funny if it weren't also a little scary.”

The GOP release then doctored Gore's quote a bit more. After all, it would be grammatically incorrect to have said, “I was the o­ne that started it all.” So, the Republican handout fixed Gore's grammar to say, “I was the o­ne who started it all.”

In just o­ne day, the key quote had transformed from “that was the o­ne that started it all” to “I was the o­ne that started it all” to “I was the o­ne who started it all.”

Instead of taking the offensive against these misquotes, Gore tried to head off the controversy by clarifying his meaning and apologizing if anyone got the wrong impression. But the fun was just beginning.

Love Factor

The national pundit shows quickly picked up the story of Gore's new “exaggeration.”

“Let's talk about the 'love' factor here,” chortled Chris Matthews of CNBC's Hardball. “Here's the guy who said he was the character Ryan O'Neal was based o­n in Love Story. … It seems to me … he's now the guy who created the Love Canal [case]. I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous? … Isn't it getting to be delusionary?”

Matthews turned to his baffled guest, Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal resident who is widely credited with bringing the issue to public attention. She sounded confused about why Gore would claim credit for discovering Love Canal, but defended Gore's hard work o­n the issue.

“I actually think he's done a great job,” Gibbs said. “I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working, o­n trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation.” [CNBC's Hardball, Dec. 1, 1999]

The next morning, Post political writer Ceci Connolly highlighted Gore's boast and placed it in his alleged pattern of falsehoods. “Add Love Canal to the list of verbal missteps by Vice President Gore,” she wrote. “The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie Love Story and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site.” [Washington Post, Dec. 2, 1999]

That night, CNBC's Hardball returned to Gore's Love Canal quote by playing the actual clip but altering the context by starting Gore's comments with the words, “I found a little town…”

“It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron,” laughed Chris Matthews. “I mean how did he get this idea? Now you've seen Al Gore in action. I know you didn't know that he was the prototype for Ryan O'Neal's character in Love Story or that he invented the Internet. He now is the guy who discovered Love Canal.”

Matthews compared the Vice President to “Zelig,” the Woody Allen character whose face appeared at an unlikely procession of historic events. “What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, 'I was the main character in Love Story. I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal.”

The following day, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post elaborated o­n Gore's pathology of deception. “Again, Al Gore has told a whopper,” the Post wrote. “Again, he's been caught red-handed and again, he has been left sputtering and apologizing. This time, he falsely took credit for breaking the Love Canal story. … Yep, another Al Gore bold-faced lie.”

The editorial continued: “Al Gore appears to have as much difficulty telling the truth as his boss, Bill Clinton. But Gore's lies are not just false, they're outrageously, stupidly false. It's so easy to determine that he's lying, you have to wonder if he wants to be found out.

“Does he enjoy the embarrassment? Is he hell-bent o­n destroying his own campaign? … Of course, if Al Gore is determined to turn himself into a national laughingstock, who are we to stand in his way?”

Fantasyland

The Love Canal controversy soon moved beyond the Washington-New York power axis.

On Dec. 6, The Buffalo News ran an editorial entitled, “Al Gore in Fantasyland,” that echoed the words of RNC chief Nicholson. It stated, “Never mind that he didn't invent the Internet, serve as the model for Love Story or blow the whistle o­n Love Canal. All of this would be funny if it weren't so disturbing.”

The next day, the right-wing Washington Times judged Gore crazy. “The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings,” the Times wrote. “Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusional' thusly: 'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is actually not present … a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'”

The editorial denounced Gore as “a politician who not o­nly manufactures gross, obvious lies about himself and his achievements but appears to actually believe these confabulations.”

Yet, while the national media was excoriating Gore, the Concord students were learning more than they had expected about how media and politics work in modern America.

For days, the students pressed for a correction from The Washington Post and The New York Times. But the prestige papers balked, insisting that the error was insignificant.

“The part that bugs me is the way they nit pick,” said Tara Baker, a Concord High junior. “[But] they should at least get it right.” [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

When the David Letterman show made Love Canal the jumping off point for a joke list: “Top 10 Achievements Claimed by Al Gore,” the students responded with a press release entitled “Top 10 Reasons Why Many Concord High Students Feel Betrayed by Some of the Media Coverage of Al Gore's Visit to Their School.” [Boston Globe, Dec. 26, 1999]

he Web site, The Daily Howler, also was hectoring what it termed a “grumbling editor” at the Post to correct the error.

Incorrect Correction

Finally, o­n Dec. 7, a week after Gore's comment, the Post published a partial correction, tucked away as the last item in a corrections box. But the Post still misled readers about what Gore actually said.

The Post correction read: “In fact, Gore said, 'That was the o­ne that started it all,' referring to the congressional hearings o­n the subject that he called.”

The revision fit with the Post's insistence that the two quotes meant pretty much the same thing, but again, the newspaper was distorting Gore's clear intent by attaching “that” to the wrong antecedent. From the full quote, it's obvious the “that” refers to the Toone toxic waste case, not to Gore's hearings.

Three days later, The New York Times followed suit with a correction of its own, but again without fully explaining Gore's position. “They fixed how they misquoted him, but they didn't tell the whole story,” commented Lindsey Roy, another Concord High junior.

While the students voiced disillusionment, the two reporters involved showed no remorse for their mistake. “I really do think that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion,” said Katharine Seelye of the Times. “It was o­ne word.”

The Post's Ceci Connolly even defended her inaccurate rendition of Gore's quote as something of a journalistic duty. “We have an obligation to our readers to alert them [that] this [Gore's false boasting] continues to be something of a habit,” she said. [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

The half-hearted corrections also did not stop newspapers around the country from continuing to use the bogus quote.

A Dec. 9 editorial in the Lancaster [Pa.] New Era even published the polished misquote that the Republican National Committee had stuck in a press release: “I was the o­ne who started it all.”

The New Era then went o­n to psychoanalyze Gore. “Maybe the lying is a symptom of a more deeply-rooted problem: Al Gore doesn't know who he is,” the editorial stated. “The Vice President is a serial prevaricator.”

In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, writer Michael Ruby concluded that “the Gore of '99” was full of lies. He “suddenly discovers elastic properties in the truth,” Ruby declared. “He invents the Internet, inspires the fictional hero of Love Story, blows the whistle o­n Love Canal. Except he didn't really do any of those things.” [Dec. 12, 1999]

On Dec. 19, GOP chairman Nicholson was back o­n the offensive. Far from apologizing for the RNC's misquotes, Nicholson was reprising the allegations of Gore's falsehoods that had been repeated so often that they had taken o­n the color of truth: “Remember, too, that this is the same guy who says he invented the Internet, inspired Love Story and discovered Love Canal.”

Ripple Effect

More than two weeks after the Post correction, the bogus quote was still spreading. The Providence Journal lashed out at Gore in an editorial that reminded readers that Gore had said about Love Canal, “I was the o­ne that started it all.” The editorial then turned to the bigger picture:

“This is the third time in the last few months that Mr. Gore has made a categorical assertion that is – well, untrue. … There is an audacity about Mr. Gore's howlers that is stunning. … Perhaps it is time to wonder what it is that impels Vice President Gore to make such preposterous claims, time and again.” [Providence Journal, Dec. 23, 1999]

On New Year's Eve, a column in The Washington Times returned again to the theme of Gore's pathological lies.

Entitled “Liar, Liar; Gore's Pants o­n Fire,” the column by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder concluded that “when Al Gore lies, it's without any apparent reason. Mr. Gore had already established his credits o­n environmental issues, for better or worse, and had even been anointed 'Mr. Ozone.' So why did he have to tell students in Concord, New Hampshire, ‘I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing o­n the issue. I was the o­ne that started it all.'” [Washington Times, Dec. 31, 1999]

The characterization of Gore as a clumsy liar continued into the New Year. Again in The Washington Times, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. put Gore's falsehoods in the context of a sinister strategy:

“Deposit so many deceits and falsehoods o­n the public record that the public and the press simply lose interest in the truth. This, the Democrats thought, was the method behind Mr. Gore's many brilliantly conceived little lies. Except that Mr. Gore's lies are not brilliantly conceived. In fact, they are stupid. He gets caught every time … Just last month, Mr. Gore got caught claiming … to have been the whistle-blower for 'discovering Love Canal.'” [Washington Times, Jan. 7, 2000]

It was unclear where Tyrrell got the quote, “discovering Love Canal,” since not even the false quotes had put those words in Gore's mouth. But Tyrrell's description of what he perceived as Gore's strategy of flooding the public debate with “deceits and falsehoods” might fit better with what the news media and the Republicans had been doing to Gore.

Beyond Love Canal, the other prime examples of Gore's “lies” –  inspiring the male lead in Love Story and working to create the Internet – also stemmed from a quarrelsome reading of his words, followed by exaggeration and ridicule rather than a fair assessment of how his comments and the truth matched up.

The earliest of these Gore “lies,” dating back to 1997, was Gore mentioning a press report that indicated that he and his wife Tipper had served as models for the lead characters in the sentimental bestseller and movie, Love Story.

When the author, Erich Segal, was asked about this, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore as well as after Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. But Segal said the female lead, Jenny, was not modeled after Tipper Gore. [NYT, Dec. 14, 1997]

Indictment

Rather than treating this distinction as a minor point of legitimate confusion, the news media concluded that Gore had willfully lied. The media made the case an indictment against Gore’s honesty.

In doing so, however, the media repeatedly misstated the facts, insisting that Segal had denied that Gore was the model for the lead male character. In reality, Segal had confirmed that Gore was, at least partly, the inspiration for the character, Barrett, played by Ryan O'Neal in the movie.

Some journalists seemed to understand the nuance but still could not resist disparaging Gore's honesty.

For instance, in its attack o­n Gore over the Love Canal quote, the Boston Herald conceded that Gore “did provide material” for Segal's book, but the newspaper added that it was “for a minor character.” [Boston Herald, Dec. 5, 1999] That, of course, was untrue, since the Barrett character was o­ne of Love Story's two principal characters.

The media's treatment of the Internet comment followed a similar course. Gore's statement may have been poorly phrased, but its intent was clear: he was trying to say that he worked in Congress to help develop the modern Internet. Gore wasn’t claiming to have “invented” the Internet, which carried the notion of a hands-on computer engineer.

Gore's actual comment, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that aired o­n March 9, 1999, was as follows: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

Republicans quickly went to work o­n Gore's statement. In press releases, they noted that the precursor of the Internet, called ARPANET, existed in 1971, a half dozen years before Gore entered Congress. But ARPANET was a tiny networking of about 30 universities, a far cry from today's “information superhighway,” a phrase widely credited to Gore.

As the media clamor arose about Gore's supposed claim that he had invented the Internet, Gore's spokesman Chris Lehane tried to explain. He noted that Gore “was the leader in Congress o­n the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today.” [AP, March 11, 1999]

There was no disputing Lehane's description of Gore's lead congressional role in developing today's Internet. But the media was off and running.

Whatever imprecision may have existed in Gore's original comment, it paled beside the distortions of what Gore clearly meant. While excoriating Gore's phrasing as an exaggeration, the media engaged in its own exaggeration.

Yet, faced with the national media putting a hostile cast o­n his Internet statement – that he was willfully lying – Gore chose again to express his regret at his choice of words.

Hostility

Now, with the Love Canal controversy, this media pattern of distortion has returned with a vengeance. The national news media has put a false quote into Gore's mouth and then extrapolated from it to the point of questioning his sanity. Even after the quote was acknowledged to be wrong, the words continued to be repeated, again becoming part of Gore's “record.”

At times, the media jettisoned any pretext of objectivity. According to various accounts of the first Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., reporters openly mocked Gore as they sat in a nearby press room and watched the debate o­n television.

Several journalists later described the incident, but without overt criticism of their colleagues. As The Daily Howler observed, Time's Eric Pooley cited the reporters' reaction o­nly to underscore how Gore was failing in his “frenzied attempt to connect.”

“The ache was unmistakable – and even touching – but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it,” Pooley wrote. “Whenever Gore came o­n too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”

Hotline's Howard Mortman described the same behavior as the reporters “groaned, laughed and howled” at Gore's comments.

Later, during an appearance o­n C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Salon's Jake Tapper cited the Hanover incident, too. “I can tell you that the o­nly media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that's the o­nly time I've ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any event.” [See The Daily Howler, Dec. 14, 1999]

Traditionally, journalists pride themselves in maintaining deadpan expressions in such public settings, at most chuckling at a comment or raising an eyebrow, but never displaying overt contempt. The anti-Gore bias of the major news media continued o­n through Campaign 2000.

Preemptive War

In 2001, after Bush claimed the White House with the help of five Republican allies o­n the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore withdrew from the public spotlight. After the 9/11 attacks, he offered support to President Bush, but Gore grew uneasy as Bush promulgated a global strategy of preemptive war, reserving the right to attack any country that might somehow threaten the United States sometime in the future.

On Sept. 23, 2002, Gore delivered a comprehensive critique of Bush’s radical departure from decades of American support for international law. In his speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Gore laid out a series of concerns and differences that he had with Bush’s preemption policy and specifically Bush’s decision to refashion the “war o­n terror” into an immediate war with Iraq.

Gore, who had supported the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, criticized Bush’s failure to enlist the international community as his father did. Gore also warned about the negative impact that alienating other nations was having o­n the broader war against terrorists.

“I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century,” Gore said. “To put first things first, I believe that we ought to be focusing our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us o­n Sept. 11. … Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from o­ne unfinished task to another. We should remain focused o­n the war against terrorism.”

Instead of keeping after al-Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan, Bush had chosen to jump to a new war against Iraq as the first example of his policy of preemption, Gore said.

“He is telling us that our most urgent task right now is to shift our focus and concentrate o­n immediately launching a new war against Saddam Hussein,” Gore said. “And the President is proclaiming a new uniquely American right to preemptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat.”

Gore also objected to the timing of the vote o­n war with Iraq. “President Bush is demanding, in this high political season, that Congress speedily affirm that he has the necessary authority to proceed immediately against Iraq and, for that matter, under the language of his resolution, against any other nation in the region regardless of subsequent developments or emerging circumstances,” Gore said.

The former Vice President staked out a position with subtle but important differences from Bush’s broad assertion that the United States has the right to override international law o­n the President’s command. Gore argued that U.S. unilateral power should be used sparingly, o­nly in extreme situations.

“There’s no international law that can prevent the United States from taking action to protect our vital interests when it is manifestly clear that there’s a choice to be made between law and our survival,” Gore said. “Indeed, international law itself recognizes that such choices stay within the purview of all nations. I believe, however, that such a choice is not presented in the case of Iraq.”

Loss of Goodwill

Gore bemoaned, too, that Bush’s actions have dissipated the international good will that surrounded the United States after the 9/11 attacks.

“That has been squandered in a year’s time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we’re going to do,” Gore said. “Now, my point is not that they’re right to feel that way, but that they do feel that way.”

Gore also took aim at Bush’s unilateral assertion of his right to imprison American citizens without trial or legal representation simply by labeling them “enemy combatants.”

“The very idea that an American citizen can be imprisoned without recourse to judicial process or remedy, and that this can be done o­n the sole say-so of the President of the United States or those acting in his name, is beyond the pale and un-American, and ought to be stopped,” Gore said.

Gore raised, too, practical concerns about the dangers that might follow the overthrow of Hussein, if chaos in Iraq followed. Gore cited the deteriorating political condition in Afghanistan where the new central government exerted real control o­nly in parts of Kabul while ceding effective power to warlords in the countryside.

“What if, in the aftermath of a war against Iraq, we faced a situation like that, because we’ve washed our hands of it?” Gore asked. “What if the al-Qaeda members infiltrated across the borders of Iraq the way they are in Afghanistan? … Now, I just think that if we end the war in Iraq the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could very well be much worse off than we are today.”

While it may have been understandable why Bush’s supporters would be upset over Gore’s address – radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh said he was unable to get to sleep after listening to it – their subsequent reaction was more attuned to obscuring Gore’s arguments than addressing what he actually said.

Rather than welcome a vigorous debate o­n the merits and shortcomings of the so-called “Bush Doctrine,” right-wing and mainstream commentators treated Gore as dishonest, unpatriotic and even unhinged.

Slapped Around

Gore was slapped around by Beltway political analysts, hit from all angles, variously portrayed as seeking cheap political gain and committing political suicide.

Helped by the fact that Gore’s speech received spotty television coverage – MSNBC carried excerpts live and C-SPAN replayed the speech later that night – pro-Bush commentators were free to distort Gore’s words and then dismiss his arguments as “lies” largely because few Americans actually heard what he had said.

Some epithets came directly from Bush partisans. Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke called Gore a “political hack.” An administration source told The Washington Post that Gore was simply “irrelevant,” a theme that would be repeated often in the days after Gore’s speech. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2002]

Other barrages were fired off by artillery battalions of right-wing opinion-makers from the strategic high ground of leading editorial pages, o­n talk radio and o­n television chat shows.

“Gore’s speech was o­ne no decent politician could have delivered,” wrote Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. “It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts – bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible.” [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002]

“A pudding with no theme but much poison,” declared another Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer. “It was a disgrace – a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002]

At Salon.com, Andrew Sullivan entitled his piece about Gore’s speech “The Opportunist” and characterized Gore as “bitter.”

While some depicted Gore’s motivation as political “opportunism,” columnist William Bennett mocked Gore for sealing his political doom and banishing himself “from the mainstream of public opinion.”

In an Op-Ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, entitled “Al Gore’s Political Suicide,” Bennett said Gore had “made himself irrelevant by his inconsistency” and had engaged in “an act of self-immolation” by daring to criticize Bush’s policy. “Now we have reason to be grateful o­nce again that Al Gore is not the man in the White House, and never will be,” Bennett wrote. [Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26, 2002]

When the conservative pundits addressed Gore’s actual speech, his words were bizarrely parsed or selectively edited to allow reprising of the news media’s favorite “Lyin’ Al” canard from the presidential campaign.

Kelly, for instance, resumed his editorial harangue with the argument that Gore was lying when the former Vice President said “the vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized.”

To Kelly, this comment was “reprehensible” and “a lie.” Kelly continued, “The men who ‘implemented’ the ‘cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans’ are dead; they died in the act of murder o­n Sept. 11. Gore can look this up.” Kelly added that most of the rest were in prison or o­n the run.

Yet, Kelly’s remarks were obtuse even by his standards. Gore clearly was talking about the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, who indeed had not been located. [Kelly later died in a vehicle accident in Iraq.]

Still, the underlying theme running through the attacks against Gore and other critics of Bush’s “preemptive war” policy was that a thorough debate would not be tolerated. Rather than confront arguments o­n their merits, Bush’s supporters simply drummed Gore and fellow skeptics out of Washington’s respectable political society.

More than four years later, with more than 3,200 U.S. soldiers dead and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead too, the consequence of the news media’s hostility toward Gore is more apparent.

The question remains, however, whether the major U.S. news media has learned its lesson about the importance of journalistic professionalism and about the harm that can befall even a great nation if the public acts o­n “facts” that are not facts.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at http://secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at http://Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

To comment at Consortiumblog: http://consortiumblog.com. To comment to us by e-mail: http://consortnew@aol.com. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the o­ne you just read: http://consortiumnews.com.

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TRAGIC DELUSIONS

William Blum is an astute critic and a straight talker who makes it into the editorial pages of the New York Times. I like his insights into misconceptions that hold us trapped in this reality which just came around in his latest Anti-Empire Report:

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer31.htm. This is the meatiest part of that mailing.

Some things you need to know before the world ends

March 22, 2006

by William Blum

“Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.” Friedrich Schiller
“With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain.”

…Inasmuch as I can not see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn't quite match the government's firepower, not to mention their viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial monster other than increasing the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass; at which point … I can't predict the form the explosion will take.

I'm speaking here of education, and in my writing and in my public talks I like to emphasize certain points which try to deal with the underlying intellectual misconceptions and emotional “hangups” I think Americans have which stand in the way of their seeing through the bullshit; this education can also take the form of demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience, whatever might produce a thaw in a frozen mind. Briefly, here are the main points:

(1) US foreign policy does not “mean well”. It's not that American leaders have miscalculated, or blundered, causing great suffering, as in Iraq, while having noble intentions. Rather, while pursuing their imperial goals they simply do not care about the welfare of the foreign peoples who are o­n the receiving end of the bombing and the torture, and we should not let them get away with claiming such intentions.

(2) The United States is not concerned with this thing called “democracy”, no matter how many times George W. uses the word each time he opens his mouth. In the past 60 years, the US has attempted to overthrow literally dozens of democratically-elected governments, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and grossly interfered in as many democratic elections in every corner of the world. The question is: What do the Busheviks mean by “democracy”? The last thing they have in mind is any kind of economic democracy, the closing of the gap between the desperate poor and those for whom too much is not enough. The first thing they have in mind is making sure the target country has the political, financial and legal mechanisms in place to make it hospitable to corporate globalization.

(3) Anti-American terrorists are not motivated by hatred or envy of freedom or democracy, or by American wealth, secular government, or culture. They are motivated by decades of awful things done to their homelands by US foreign policy. It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of Washington's dreadful policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations. The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan have created thousands of new anti-American terrorists. We'll be hearing from them for a terribly long time.

(4) The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, o­nly those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There is a lengthy and infamous history of support for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. At this moment, Luis Posada Carriles remains protected by the US government, though he masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people and his extradition has been requested by Venezuela. He's but o­ne of hundreds of anti-Castro terrorists who've been given haven in the United States over the years. The United States has also provided close support of terrorists in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran and elsewhere, including those with known connections to al Qaeda, to further imperial goals more important than fighting terrorism.

(5) Iraq was not any kind of a threat to the United States. Of the never-ending lies concerning Iraq, this is the most insidious, the necessary foundation for all the other lies. This is the supposed justification for the preemptive invasion, for what the Nuremberg Tribunal called a war of aggression. Absent such a threat, it didn't matter if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it didn't matter if the intelligence was right or wrong about this or that, or whether the Democrats also believed the lies. All that mattered was the Bush administration's claim that Iraq was an imminent threat to wreak some kind of great havoc upon America. But think about that. What possible reason could Saddam Hussein have had for attacking the United States other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide?

(6) There was never any such animal as the International Communist Conspiracy. There were, as there still are, people living in misery, rising up in protest against their condition, against an oppressive government, a government usually supported by the United States.

(7) Conservatives, particularly of the neo-kind (far to the right o­n the political spectrum), and liberals (ever so slightly to the left of center) are not ideological polar opposites. Thus, watching a TV talk show o­n foreign policy with a conservative and a liberal is not necessarily getting a “balanced” viewpoint; a more appropriate balance to a conservative would be a left-wing radical or progressive. American liberals are typically closer to conservatives o­n foreign policy than they are to these groupings o­n the left, and the educational value of such “balanced” media can be more harmful than beneficial as far as seeing through the empire's motives and actions…

[William Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. He then became o­ne of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first “alternative” newspaper in the capital. Mr. Blum has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. William Blum is currently living in Washington, DC, using the Library of Congress and the National Archives to strike fear into the hearts of US government imperialists.]

I think an alignment of intelligent people like Blum could contribute to an escalation of  “the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass.” For people who haven't been with me long enough to hear me rant about this, pick up o­n The Twilight Club for a model from the last century, where shapers of thought united to do massive good in the world. The good that a contemporary version could contribute would be to think through our dead worldview which has us in dualistic hell. Let wise o­nes amongst us come up with a new idea about who we are and what we're doing here that would serve us better.

Here are some tidbits about The Twilight Club

, some of whose members were Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas J. Watson, Rudyard Kipling, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Louis Tiffany.

Their conviction was that world peace, harmony and unity would o­nly come about through the brotherhood of man. They were convinced that a person’s moral creed could not remain as words and platitudes, but must be translated into action. Building o­n this idea, they formed The Poets’ Code of Ethics, intended as a worldwide moral code that related strictly to how people acted towards each other, the ethical nature of the code being based o­n the concept of service to others and to the world…

Andrew Carnegie strongly advocated the necessity of spreading the seeds of culture, morality and ethics. He promised to endow millions for educational purposes—particularly through building libraries. He also organized the Authors’ Club, providing a house o­n 34th Street in New York, entirely free of charge providing that each member of the club agreed to write something every year that had a direct bearing o­n and reference to the moral code of ethics…

Out of this visionary effort came the Scout movement…As their meetings were ‘rotated’ from house to house, they eventually named their group the Rotary Club, now the Rotary Club International, with millions of members all over the world devoted to service. Other service clubs followed, such as the Kiwanis and the Lions.

Others inspired by the Twilight Club vision, such as Edwin Markham and Sophie Irene Loeb, worked to bring about change in social conditions, such as the elimination of sweatshops, compulsory education and child labor laws. Eugene Grace, president of the Bethlehem Steel Company, and Adolph Ochs, owner of the New York Times, worked to establish advertising censorship. Thomas J. Watson and Walter Russell campaigned for the elimination of the caveat emptor practice of business, which eventually led to the establishment of the Better Business Bureaus.

After the war years, Thomas J. Watson, head of International Business Machines, became inspired by the ideals of the ethical movement organized by Herbert Spencer, wanting the business world to practice these principles. He offered to pay all expenses necessary for the club activities. He, Walter Russell and Edwin Markham decided to stress culture as well as ethics, since culture stems from the arts, for World War o­ne had caused a drop in cultural growth and patronage of the arts. They decided to call this extension of the Twilight Club, The Society of Arts and Science. Taking leadership, Thomas J. Watson and Walter Russell—who lectured for twelve years to IBM employees o­n better business practices—worked with others, such as Francis Sisson, from the banking, business and legal world, to uplift the standards of industry, law and justice.

For more education to help flesh out the picture of our Iraq debacle, which feels like Greek tragedy when you put all the pieces together, I recommend a shocking piece from the New Yorker magazine: Deluded, by Steve Coll. This information, just coming to light about the state Saddam was in before the invasion, concerns a study which reveals “how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam’s palaces in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the West Wing.”…

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The truth would be a start to setting us free.

As you'll read in Stop Bush's War, “Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim Russert that things were going 'very, very well' in Iraq.” I've been preoccupied of late with some family matters, so when I heard that March 5th, while I was listening to Meet the Press, as o­nly o­ne statement the General made in a long upbeat report about Iraq, I wondered if there was some chance, somehow, some way, very very strange but true, that I had slipped away from a realistic understanding of what is going o­n. I mean, how could General Pace have been speaking so positively and Russert not be appalled at what he was saying if things were as I thought they were? But, no such luck. The inmates still are running the asylum.

I can barely read any more run-downs by eloquent writers who tell essentially the same depressing tales about Iraq. However, Stop Bush's War got me. For my sensibilities, Bob Herbert caught it just right. After you are thoroughly radicalized, which many of us have been for a long time, then what? How do we move out of our dualistic perspective in which we are so oppositional to where we  appreciate our mutuality  and start thinking as a planet? For a place to start, I'd get every person of influence to sign o­nto being in agreement with Herbert. You've got to acknowledge a problem in order to go to work o­n it; to get us out of this war conundrum, the first step is for the Administration to admit we are in it. This piece calls for that so compellingly that I wonder if a chorus of every thinking person harmonized in support of it — a doable exercise, given the Net — might force the Administration to change its crazed tune.

Stop Bush's War

By BOB HERBERT

NY Times Op-Ed: March 16, 2006

“By some estimates,” according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, “the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has reached six figures – vastly more than have been killed by all international terrorists in all of history. Sanctions o­n Iraq probably were a necessary cause of death for an even greater number of Iraqis, most of them children.”

Not everyone agrees that Iraqi deaths have reached six figures. President Bush gave an estimate of 30,000 not too long ago. That's probably low, but horrendous nevertheless. In any event, there is broad agreement that the number of Iraqis slaughtered has reached into the tens of thousands. An ocean of blood has been shed in Mr. Bush's mindless war, and there is no end to this tragic flow in sight. Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times gave us the following chilling paragraphs in Tuesday's paper:

“In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.

“They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings o­n loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that.”

Everyone who thought this war was a good idea was wrong and ought to admit it. Those who still think it's a good idea should get therapy.

Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled “Vietnam and the Presidency” was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.

Some of the lessons seemed embarrassingly basic. Jack Valenti, who served as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, reminded us how difficult it is to “impress democracy” o­n other countries. And he noted something that the public and the politicians seem to forget each time the glow of a brand-new war is upon us: that wars are “inhumane, brutal, callous and full of depravity.”

Think Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Think suicide bombers and death squads and roadside bombs. Think of the formerly healthy men and women who have come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed, or without their arms or legs or eyes, or the full use of their minds. Think of the many thousands dead.

Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that the best way to fight it was with other people's children. That in itself is a form of depravity.

Among those who played a key role in the conference was David Halberstam, the author of “The Best and the Brightest,” which is not just the best book about America's involvement in Vietnam, but a book that grows more essential with each passing year. If you read it in the 70's or 80's, read it again. We can all use a refresher course o­n the link between folly and madness at the highest levels of government, and the all-but-unimaginable suffering it can unleash.

In the book's epilogue, Mr. Halberstam wrote that, among other things, President Johnson “and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk.”

That latter kind of toughness is what's needed now. Invading Iraq was a disastrous move by the Bush administration, and there is no satisfactory solution forthcoming. The White House should be working cooperatively with members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring the curtain down o­n U.S. involvement.

Before that can begin to happen, the administration will have to rid itself of the delusion that things are somehow going well in Iraq. The democracy that was supposed to flower in the Iraqi desert and then spread throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush continues to assert that our goal in Iraq is “victory.” Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim Russert that things were going “very, very well” in Iraq.

They are still crawling toward the mirage. It's time to give reality a chance.

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