Guilty (32 page)

Practicing a “new kind of politics” before a new kind of politics was cool, President Bush dismissed the rumors, saying, “There might have been a prank or two. Maybe somebody put a cartoon on the wall, but that's O.K.”
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So here you had a situation where the official White House position was to deny any vandalism and refuse to produce an
official accounting of the damage, even as White House staffers were telling reporters what they had seen with their own eyes. For the first time in world history, the establishment media believed the official White House line from a Republican president.

With the White House refusing to produce records of the damage, the General Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that no damage had been done.
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The GAO didn't issue an official report; it merely provided a one-page letter reflecting the fact that the administration refused to produce records of the damage, noting that “White House repair records do not contain information on the causes of damage being repaired.”
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Suspiciously, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer refused to comment one way or another on any damage, saying, “The White House is going to continue to be gracious in its approach to the matter.” He added, “I think all parties are best served by letting this matter and what was done become a part of history.”
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In what was to become a pattern, Bush left his fellow Republicans twisting in the wind, accused of being liars, while he tried fruitlessly to appease Democrats.

Seeing that the White House was refusing to cooperate with an investigation into the Clinton staffers' vandalism, Democrats got on their high horses, claiming to be offended, outraged, shocked, and appalled by the original reports of vandalism from anonymous staffers. The howling hyenas wailed that they were victims of Republican smears. Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner delivered a letter to the White House—and more important, the press—signed by thirty-five members of the Clinton administration demanding an official apology. Mark Shields expressed the prevailing dudgeon about the vandalism story, saying, “The whole story was a fabrication and, to be blunt, a lie. It was a deception carefully cultivated by the Bush White House and then fed to friendly conservative journalists who were duped into perpetrating this fraud upon their readers and their listeners.”
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The headlines blared the news that the vandalism was a “lie” and a “hoax”:

Finally, exasperated House Republicans demanded that the GAO actually investigate, enraged that Republicans were being called liars on the basis of Bush's gallantry.

Forced to investigate something the Bush White House didn't want investigated, the GAO eventually concluded—as described in the
New York Times,
June 12, 2002:

So I guess it was Krugman's own newspaper that put out the “false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out”—by quoting the official GAO report. Foiled by the conservative bias of the
New York Times
again! This is how liberals rewrite history: No matter how many times we correct them, they just keep
repeating provable lies. Over and over again, conservatives are forced to keep reminding people:

The Willie Horton ads were the most magnificent campaign ads in political history.

At the conclusion of the Anita Hill hearings, only 24 percent of Americans believed Hill, while nearly 60 percent of Americans believed Clarence Thomas,
²³
and the ratio was closer to 20 to 1 among those who worked with Thomas and Hill.
²⁴

Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention was a barn burner, not only with the delighted delegates but also with liberal commentators, who gave the speech rave reviews, such as NBC's John Chancellor (“an excellent speech”) and ABC's David Brinkley (“an outstandingly good political speech”),
²⁵
Hal Bruno (“I've never seen a better first night”), and Ted Koppel (“[The delegates] walked out of here tonight enthusiastic, [with] a sense of optimism”). Apparently the viewers at home liked it too, giving Bush a 10-point leap in the polls, his biggest one-day bump in the entire campaign.
²⁶

The Bush campaign did not spread rumors that John McCain had a black illegitimate child during the 2000 GOP primary.
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Liberals behaved so abominably at Senator Paul Wellstone's memorial service, showering Republican senators “with boos and catcalls from the crowd,” that a disgusted Jesse Ventura stormed out. That's according to former Democratic senator Tom Daschle, who also said that the audience's behavior was so “inappropriate and wrong” that on the plane back to Washington that night, he and his fellow Democratic senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan agreed “we were going to pay a price for what had just happened.”
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And …

The GAO investigation concluded that Clinton's staff trashed the White House on the way out.

Interestingly, Krugman dropped from his list of “pseudoscandals” the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which might strike some as a slight oversight. This is on the order of not mentioning Watergate in a list of Nixon administration scandals. How about the scandal that led to only the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history, which came out of what Krugman called the “pretty honest” Clinton administration?

But according to Krugman the “pretty honest” Clinton administration was victimized by unfair news coverage. The only living human who might agree with that assessment is Bill Clinton, who derisively referred to
Newsweek
magazine as “the house organ of Paula Jones”
²⁹
—an unfortunate use of “Paula Jones” and “organ” in the same sentence.

Yes, he was referring to the magazine that refused to report Paula Jones's accusations against Clinton for months, described Jones as a “dogpatch Madonna,” killed Michael Isikoff s exclusive on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and unaccountably employs braying left-wing slattern Eleanor Clift, who named Clinton the “Biggest Winner of the Year” for being a “a colossus on the world stage” in 1999—the very year Clinton was impeached and the entire Supreme Court boycotted his State of the Union Address.
³⁰

This is the magazine that Clinton accuses of victimizing him.

WHILE MAINSTREAM JOURNALISTS COMPLAIN THAT THE SCANDAL that led to the only presidential impeachment of the twentieth century got too much media coverage, they are always bitterly complaining that their synthetic little scandals aren't getting enough media coverage. Hitler blamed the Reichstag fire on the Communists to consolidate power—but at least there really was a fire. America's establishment media just go about creating fake news stories and then demanding that the rest of us take them seriously. “No one is covering X” is mainstream media code meaning there has been nonstop coverage, the subject has been exhausted, the zone has been flooded—but, alas, the public doesn't care.