Posted on 08/06/2003 8:26:42 AM PDT by ServesURight
Gored
In the 2000 presidential campaign, the running narrative was that Al Gore was a big liar and the worst that could be said about George W. Bush was that he was kind of dumb.
The mainstream media, never ones for complexity, played these cardboard caricatures to the hilt. Every Bush stumble meant he was the village idiot, while the press corps nitpicked seemingly every remark the vice president made, turning truths into exaggerations and minor inconsistencies into outrageous lies.
Indeed, the notion that Al Gore said he invented the Internet is a hoary urban myth (go to snopes.com and do a search on "Gore") that the Bush campaign itself exploited in one of its attack ads. Other Gore "lies" that were endlessly flogged by Bush supporters, the media, and the Republican Party turned out to be either true or something other than what Gore originally claimed. (For a good summary of this, go to http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm?ID=3729&view=print) .
Comedian and Al Gore supporter Al Franken has recently made short work of the Gore-as-liar/trustworthy-Bush legend, pointing out that when Gore had erroneously claimed he visited a specific disaster area in Texas with James Lee Witt, the head of FEMA, the press jumped all over it as another example of Gore's web of conceit. Seems Gore had gone to 17 other disaster sites with Witt, but not to that one in Texas. "It was," Franken said, "as if James Lee Witt was the most popular man in America and Gore was lying to get some of that James Lee Witt magic."
On the other hand, as Franken pointed out, when George W. Bush claimed that the vast majority of his tax cut went to those at the bottom, the supposedly liberal media didn't challenge him at all. (Well, to be fair, Dubya may have meant the bottom of the Fortune 500 list.) Indeed, it's probably not a stretch to say that the running narrative in 2000 -- that Gore is a liar and Bush is a trustworthy if less-than-brilliant good ol' boy -- cost Gore the closest election in U.S. history. A dumb, honest hick can at least surround himself with good people and point the country in the right direction, but a guileful, mustache-twisting mandarin will surely bring the nation to ruin.
Fast-forward to 2003. One wonders how the press would have reacted if Al Gore had sent our country to war based on a string of B.S. that could stretch from Washington to the tip of the Aleutian Islands. Ask yourself, would "Liar" Gore have been able get away with saying that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger, even though Iraq didn't, the documents that purportedly said it did were clumsy forgeries, and a diplomat who had been sent to investigate the claim had told Vice President Lieberman's office the claim was false?
If a former CIA director had accused President Al Gore of "overstretching the facts" (i.e. exaggerating) about weapons of mass destruction to rally the nation to war, do you have any doubt Big Liar Al would have been tarred and feathered by now?
Would Gore have been able to consistently flog a supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda with no credible evidence of any such connection? Would he have been able to get away with suppressing the results of the interrogations of two top Al Qaeda leaders who said in separate interviews that Al Qaeda had not worked with Saddam?
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. For those who have been paying close attention to Bush's, um, exaggerations, the media-fueled fable about dumb, guileless George vs. shiftless Al looks nothing less than bizarre. Indeed, if Al Gore was an inveterate liar, George W. Bush is Satan's press secretary. Still, as a feeble last attempt at exonerating the media for its outrageously pro-Bush coverage in 2000, a cynic might say the press was just giving the public what it wanted. We pay no attention to this dry policy stuff, but we sure as heck responded to the juicy "gotcha!" appeal of some of Gore's alleged misstatements.
Well, let's all open our Web browsers to http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayaninteresti ngday.html and read along with the class. Scroll about a third of the way down, and you'll see this gem, taken from a White House news release: "On December 4, 2001, Bush was asked: 'How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?' Bush replied, 'I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn't have much time to think about it.'"
Here he was clearly talking about the first attack, because he then said: "I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my chief of staff, who is sitting over here, walked in and said, 'A second plane has hit the tower. America's under attack.'"
Also, in his address to the nation on Sept. 11, Bush said, "Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans." Both these claims are demonstrably false. Footage of the first terrorist attack wasn't available until the following day, so no one who wasn't in New York saw the planes going in.
Now, memory is a tricky thing. It's possible that on the most memorable day of many Americans' lives, Bush misremembered the details. It could also be that he was concocting a story to explain away an embarrassing detail that relates to his second misstatement -- that he immediately implemented emergency response plans.
In fact, after the first terrorist attack that Bush claims he witnessed and chalked up to pilot error, he obviously didn't implement emergency response plans. Indeed, even after hearing news of the second attack that Card famously whispered in his ear, he still didn't implement emergency response plans. This statement, in an address to the nation, was simply a lie.
What did Bush do? For at least five minutes, probably longer, he watched a classroom full of second-graders read a story about a goat. It's all on video, and you can see it here: www. thememoryhole.org. So maybe Al Gore was deliberately deceiving the public about seeing a particular disaster site in Texas with James Lee Witt after seeing 17 others with the same man, rather than just misremembering the details. And maybe George W. Bush was misremembering what he saw and the actions he took on the nation's most memorable day in almost 40 years, rather than lying.
Anything's possible. But that the media jumped all over Gore but has given Bush a free pass on the World Trade Center/goat thing is simply bizarre.
But then we know Bush is an honest guy. The question is, is he dumb enough to sit and listen to a story about goats while the country is under attack?
"While in Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet." --Algore. Sounds like a claim of invention to me.
He placed the blame on one of his assistants.
More like one of his accomplices.
DOCUMENTS LINK SADDAM, BIN LADEN
Wow, isn't that cute. A left-wing alternative newsrag.
No, it was the string of body bags that reached from the NY trade center to the dump where they stored the debris.
A volcanic vomit alert doesn't do this article justice.
This is clearly not a claim of invention but a claim of God like qualities in "creating" the internet.
When Gore made the claim to Wolf Blitzer, Wolf took him at his word and didn't even do a follow up. It is still a toss up as to which one is the bigger idiot.
That was Kosovo, and press loved it.
Funny, I was watching the fire in the first tower burn on TV and saw the second plane hit - and I'm in Kansas. Either I've got great eyesight or this statement is blatantly false.
If it is a mistake (and I'm willing to believe that it is) by simply dropping the plural on PLANES, the statement is correct. By the same token, if Bush were to have said "I saw an airplane HAD hit the tower..." there would be no disputing his remarks.
This author is disecting Bush's words in a fashion he likely wouldn't want applied to his own. Point being that this guy is stretching to try to equate Bush's folksy style of speech with Al Gore's pathological puffery.
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