In Lieu of Watching Meet the Press This Morning…

(And yes, I started this as MTP was a half-hour from starting, three hours ago.) As promised last night, I blasted through Better Than Sex before falling asleep. Yes, the pig-fucker anecdote was in there (cited below the fold), but before I get to the fold, I wanted to say two things about this book.

First, it’s definitely the clearest sign of the “wave rolling back” in HST’s own career. It came out when I was at my HST-junkie peak, but even then I was unsatisfied. It’s all too easy—too little analysis with space. Sure, the faxes are all funny and whatnot, but they all run together and make it all look very self-serving. He’s showing off that he’s connected to important people, like James Carville or Ed Turner, the Executive President at CNN, and that’s about all there is to the book, as a whole.

Second, the book reminded me of how much I hated George Herbert Walker Bush when he was running stuff and how badly I wanted him out. It’s very funny to think back to 1991 and remember that, at that time, I did not think I would ever see a worse administration in my lifetime. Even listening to the anti-Souter rants on the Digable Planets’ first album underscores this—we all thought Poppy was as bad as it could be. How wrong could we have possibly been? But there also ends up being a very eerie parallelism to the two campaigns, 1992 and 2004, that I’ll start in on below the fold.

Part of my taking a week off from politics is that I cannot stand the naked lying in the poll mongering. Gallup is polling samples where Republicans outnumber Democrats, and then we’re shocked to see that Bush ends up with a lead that matches that difference. It’s pretty sneaky. And when you consider that Democrats outvoted Republicans in 2000 (the usual, simple model for the “likely voter” poll sample group), then that discrepancy becomes fucking outrageous. Next, CNN parrots the Gallup lines with no commentary on the internals whatsoever—relying on the biggest gap to tell the biggest story, for example, about their man Bush. I’ve been crowing about lazy journalism for a decade now, since I began to understand what a number they were doing on Clinton just out of the gates, but this sort of stuff seemed totally unprecedented. Until, of course, I got to page 114 of Better Than Sex. Thompson is writing a memo to Ed Turner over at CNN:

Dear Ed…

You must be out of your fucking mind to believe that your Bush/Quayle albatross gained 17 points in the polls (in three days) because they soared like eagles out of the Houston convention. I am shocked by this horrible news-managed swill that I’m seeing on CNN right now (6:17 A. M. 8/22/92)—that George Bush is so much faster than Carl Lewis that he is suddenly (today) only two points behind Clinton, according to some alleged “popularity poll” by CBS and the New York Times.

Where did you get those numbers, Ed? From Mary Matalin?

[...]

Whoops. Here is Headline News again, saying, “It looks like a dead heat.”

Yes. Eerie similarity. HST then veers off into a picture of what could have happened regarding the numbers, which is interesting mostly since we can easily substitute in our heads “Karl Rove” for “James Baker” in the following quote. Thomspon imagines a third-shift deskman, drunk as a skunk, getting a call from a woman asking him to hold for “Mr. Baker”:

“Hi, fella. This is James Baker in the White House. You got a minute?”

“You bet, Senator. I’m all ears. How can I help you tonight? Can we put you on live?”

“Never in hell, son. You put me on live and you’ll be dead as a doornail real quick. Just shut up and write these numbers down.”

“Yes, sir. Of course. Yes. Please forgive me, sir. I was only kidding about putting you on ‘live.’ Hell no. We would never do that.”

“Me either, son. I would never threaten to have a man butchered in his own bathtub for revealing the source of confidential top-secret White House information. I could do that, but it would be wrong—wouldn’t it?”

“Absolutely, sir! Totally wrong…But you don’t have to worry about me, sir. This call never happened. We never spoke. Just like Deep Throat.”

“Exactly, son. Exactly. I knew I could trust you: We had you checked out. [Pause.] But you will need these numbers, right? Yes. You will—unless you want to spend the next 10 years of your life in a federal prison for perjury. [Shrieks of dopey laughter in background; "Baker's" voice fades in and out, then barks angrily.] Shut up! Get a pencil. Here it is. You got yourself a scoop. Stop whining and listen…. Bush is 46 percent and rising. Clinton is 48 percent and sinking like a stone. I just got the secret advance figures, son, and I’m truly amazed. The president has been gaining about a point every hour. By morning he will be ahead. It’s amazing! I’ve scheduled a press conference at sundown, when the president will call for Bill Clinton to drop out of the race.”

“What? Drop out?”

“You heard me, fella. And you better write it just like I said it [...] remember what I told you: dead heat, amazing Bush turnaround stuns Clinton as millions rally to cheer commander in chief—Demos panic as lead shrinks, Clinton helpless, General Baker seizes reins as U.S. jets strike Baghdad—Bush triumphant in Gulfport, asks Army for support as Barbara mocks Hillary. Okay, got it boy?”

“Yes, sir: 46 up, 48 down, Clinton doomed. Bush rallies, dead heat. Only two points, no hope, fat lady sings, Arkys demoralized, General Baker says, ‘We will march on a road of bones.’”

“Good work, fella—except for that stuff about bones. I didn’t say that, son. George Bush said it. But you can’t quote him, remember? Or me either, goddamnit. That was our deal.”

“You bet, sir. The fat lady said it. Trust me. I’m smart.”

Pretty astonishing, eh? That last bit about the road of bones is particularly fun, because I like how Baker attributes the quote, which didn’t come up earlier, to Bush, but says Bush can’t be quoted on it, giving the impression, off the record, that Bush is a fearless leader and Baker is only his lieutenant. This entire section is followed by a photo of Poppy dressed as a sportsman, sticking his tongue out at the camera. I had to look carefully to tell which George it was, in fact.

Later on (p. 132), Thompson faxes Carville some concern about two hospital ships deploying for the Persian Gulf, a tip he had delivered to his own fax machine earlier. If we remember Donald Rumsfeld’s recent predilection for confusing “Saddam Hussein” with “Osama bin Laden” while speaking to the public, this section gets a little surprising, also:

There are not a lot of reasons why the U.S. would be sending to huge “battle-tested” hospital ships back to the Persian Gulf at this hardball point in time…

Take my word for it, James—these lying, whorish swine will stop at nothing. How many points do you think Baker 3 believes it might be worth to Bush if he could strut out on the South Lawn of the White House on October 15 and display the still-bleeding head of Saddam Hussein on a silver platter?

Big points in Texas, James—and spontaneous riots of Bush fever all over Dade County. Hell, that head might be worth 10 points, nationwide. Think about it.

The strongest political take-home message of the book, however, is the LBJ anecdote. It’s October 14, and we have just read a series of faxes sent all around with Thompson fretting over Perot’s appearing in the debates. He’s convinced that Perot is a mole to steal votes from Clinton (which is hilarious), and in other parts of the book, he gives extended fantasies in which Perot will be President for Life and live past 100, governing exclusively by television. In any case, Thompson feels like the Clinton campaign is one scandal away from self-destructing, and he rushes off a fax to Carville that begins on p. 159. He starts in right away against the GOP (or “scum”), calling them “mean and rich and greedy and bloated with hate and fear after 12 years of power and excess profits. And they will rage against the dying of the light.” He warns about any sort of possible scandal to arise—mostly involving the kidnapping sort Thompson perfected with his drunk delegate and dead hooker story in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Then comes the gem of the book:

All I really wanted to tell you was this ancient and honorable story about how Lyndon Johnson first got elected to Congress, when his (heavily favored) opponent was a wealthy local pig farmer….

Remember that one, James? Sure you do. It’s a wonderful story, and I suspect it will cheer you up.

It goes this way: The year was 1948, as I recall, and Lyndon was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go…. He was sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference at two or two-thirty (just after lunch on a slow news day) and accuse his high-riding opponent (the pig farmer) of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children….

His campaign manager was shocked. “We can’t say that, Lyndon,” he said. “It’s not true.”

“Of course it’s not,” Johnson barked at him, “but let’s make the bastard deny it.”

It works every time, James—even on smart people. And remember: You are running against (at least) two king-hell Texas politicians who don’t mind saying that they didn’t where they are by telling the truth or being nice to people. They have controlled the most powerful office in the history of the world (sic) for 12 years, and they don’t want to give it up…. Shit, why should they? Baker and Bush, between them, have washed enough human blood off their hands to stock the plasma blanks of most small-town hospitals, and they are no longer spooked at the smell of it.

They would torture the queen of England for three days and nights to make her say that Bill Clinton raped her repeatedly while he was a student at Oxford and she has many crazed love letters to prove it. They are scum.

By the way, James—Lyndon won that election by something like 44 votes.

So don’t let it happen to you. Don’t deny anything—especially if they accuse you of fucking pigs.

Just stand up in front of the mike and smile like a champion and tell this good old classic LBJ story…. It’s pure. There’s no way to respond to it. Right: “What is this, Mr. Bush? More of your sleazy hired gossip? Good God, George! How low will you crawl?” Ho, ho.

Part of me has been wishing lately that the Kerry campaign would fight dirty like this, that they would get in the muck and not hold back, but it doesn’t seem possible. What Carville had back in ‘92 that Lockhart/Cahill/Carville/Sasso don’t have now is something even resembling fairness from the media. To me, that’s the most depressing aspect of this entire race: the media just sucks up to Bush, just like they did in 2000, starting with the poll numbers mentioned above. And why? Perhaps since when they don’t toe the line, like with the memos on CBS, an onslaught arrives on their doorstep. Remember the timeline of memogate: Freepers were already calling it a forgery within two hours of the episode’s airing, and the main claim of the entire scandal “these can be created easily on a computer” was on the crypto-fascist blog-named-after-boogers within the day. Then, with no fact-checking whatsoever, the Washington Post and cable news started running with the story. It was astonishing.

Compare that response to the approximately two weeks of uninterrupted free advertisement the Swift Boat Liars got before, finally, the Post found out that they were lying. Some blame the Kerry campaign for not having an effective rapid response team, so the journalists were waiting for the JFK spin before reporting both sides. But that’s bullshit. The very first thing I learned in writing at the Maroon was: don’t quote the press release. Journalists don’t do that. They’re supposed to be independent gatherers of information. Running with the Swiftie story just because the Democrats hadn’t denied it didn’t make it true. And, furthermore, what kind of journalism needed to be done, anyway? The Navy’s official records all—to the last one—verify the Kerry “side” of the story, so the “other side,” also known as the “likely truth,” was already available, proving that the Swifties were lying. Instead, articles start calling Kerry’s service “unclear” or “murky,” suggesting that there’s two sides to every story, and we’ll run both sides and let the reader decide. But, dammit, they don’t make any effort to show that one side is actively lying. There’s not a single thing in Kerry’s war record that’s “murky.” It’s all documented per protocol, and the Swifties themselves have backed up that story for decades, only now changing their tune, including O’Neill, who is on tape, admitting to Richard Fucking Nixon that he was in Cambodia, though he now claims that being in Cambodia would have been grounds for a court-martial. The Swfities are totally non-believable. That’s all there is to it. And the cable shows ran countless stories on them, not discrediting a word, just because they were too lazy to do anything but wait for a signal from the Democrats on how to respond to the allegations.

That’s almost a criminal level of incompetence, or, perhaps, at least a level of incompetence that should threaten the media companies’ claims on our free airwaves.

Then compare the response to the memos: experts are on the phone within a day voicing doubts (which are later recanted) about the medium, and the medium becomes, startlingly, the message. Rather, to his credit, tried to keep the message important, and it’s important to note that no one has attempted to discredit anything about the content of the memos, just about the memos themselves (if I felt like it, I would bend into Walter Benn Michaels’s take on this sort of stuff from Shape of the Signifier). And the story in the memos is recreated all over the place: no one can come forward who served with Bush, while many can say they don’t remember him. Bush refuses to answer questions beyond saying that he got an honorable discharge, thereby “proving” that he served honorably (my favorite counter-example to this is the case of the DC sniper, John Allen Muhammad, who was honorably discharged after striking an officer and going AWOL). Bush and Rove, as two nominal Texans, understand the LBJ anecdote, and they are thriving under their adherence to it.

I don’t think that there are memos coming from on high saying “pitch it towards Bush” in cable offices. Well, there are at Fox News, but I’ve written them off entirely, although with them, at least you know where they stand. I don’t buy all the “the media is for Bush since they know Colin’s twit son will deregulate all of media in the second term,” since that seems a little too tinfoily. Brokaw is retiring and Rather has shown anger and fire at being manipulated before. Both of them have nothing to lose in turning the tables on the Rovian Mendacity Express. And they must know how awful it is. They must realise the degree to which they’re being snowed. Sadly, given that, it seems like perhaps the only description that makes any sense whatsoever is the economic one. Or I’m crazy. Which I’m not: I hated the Howard Dean campaign, but I still saw how unfair the media was being to him, so it’s not just that I’m in Kerry’s pocket. I think that the media is probably just simply lazy and complacent. They don’t think the shit through anymore, or, when they do, they measure the benefit of being mean to Dick Cheney in the name of truth against the loss of suddenly not being invited to Georgetown cocktail parties where they have to show up early lest Hitchens swim through all the wine by 8:30.

So if the media won’t cut him any slack, what on earth is Kerry to do? As I remarked to Whet, Kerry is working the local media, which isn’t as out to get him. That might end up being a rather genius move. Still, it’s an abomination that he feels like the national media won’t cut him any slack. He’s started making the case rather clearly with Iraq, as he chatted with Don Imus last week. Imus is, for what it’s worth, something like the only “national” media figure who seems to like Kerry and is willing to respond to him initially by doing something other than chopping at the knees. (Olbermann might be another, which would tempt one to think that MSNBC is the “good” cable news channel. If that’s true, then it’s such a dubious distinction that it’s not really worth making.) Kerry makes the very valid point: the media is hounding him for an “Iraq plan,” trying to set him up like Nixon in ‘68. Kerry was taking the bait over the summer, and described plans for Iraq, though I disagree that back then it was like a “secret plan.” However, now he realises that there simply is no plan. Internationalisation is all Kerry can say, and that’s all he can promise to try to do, as the quagmire gets worse and worse. But in the Imus interview, he raises a very good, in fact, crucial point: first, why the hell is no one hounding Bush on his Iraq plan? It’s obvious, after all, that he has none. The Kerry campaign and others have deduced that if there is a Bush Iraq plan, it involves calling up more reserves right after the election. Yet no one asks Bush about it. Kerry’s point follows that why on earth should he have an Iraq plan when he has no idea what the hell kind of Iraq he will be inheriting in January? We all know what kind of Iraq it’ll be: a total, absolute, record-breaking clusterfuck. But Kerry can’t say that outloud, so he has to maintain a level of false optimism that Bush will do something resembling fixing the problem. Finally, there’s the important fact that there’s nothing we can do in Iraq. The war is lost. It’s probably time to start whispering the phrase “peace with honor” again.

How’s this for my first morning of not paying attention to the campaign?