When Journalists Lie: Re-Writing History

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I admit, living in the UK has spoiled me rotten to the BBC's political commentary. Their reporters and journalists are people who've covered the political scene since God was a boy, often working themselves onto the national stage by means of the provincial and local beat.

Granted, some are part of a political dynasty - in Britain, Richard Dimbleby's sons, David and Jonathan, are inheritors of his mantle, but neither erupted on the national scene until they were mature men well past the age of thirty, and neither shouted out questions to a disgraced politician centering around a sports score, the way the scion of our greatest political commentator did.

The BBC employs real political journalists. It's political "contributors" are seasoned strategists and ex-politicos, not socialites, social climbers and soccer moms, and certain not inarticulate sorority sisters.

And the historian whom they consult is Simon Schama, who is consistent, and who doesn't spin against fact about which he's written to score a point against a politician whom he thinks is "arrogant."

I have read both Rick Perlstein's books - Before the Storm, which chronicles the rise of Barry Goldwater (and also how the Birchers infiltrated the Republican party) and Nixonland.

This is why I was particularly shocked to see Perlstein wantonly revise history in this interview with Chris Matthews earlier this week. It was directly the opposite of what actually happened in the first debate of 1960.

Quite specifically, Kennedy didn't blind Nixon with sweeping liberal confidence and rhetoric to the point that Nixon broke out into a sweat. The fact is, as Perlstein reports in pages 52-58 of Nixonland, Nixon was ill at the time of the debate and had a temperature of 101 degrees. To whit, the man was sweating before the debate even started, from fever, though it pains me to be seen as defending such an odious being as Richard Nixon.

But here are Perlstein's own words from his own book - words that are not cherry-picked or spun:-

Nixon was knocking off states in the South at a handsome clip when he contracted a staph infection from banging his knee on a car door. His physicians counselled three weeks in the hospital. Newspaper journalists urged the honorable course on his opponent: to cease campaigning for those three weeks. The Democrat sent a get-well message instead. (And they called Dick Nixon the dirty one). Ill-advisedly, Nixon kept on knocking off states: Maryland and Indiana and Texas and California his first day out, Oregon and Idaho with a side trip up to Canada the second. The next day, between Grand Forks and Peoria, Richard Nixon caught a cold. Then as he crossed the tarmac in the rain, flew the red-eye to St Louis, and struggled to connect with a hostile Democratic crowd of union machinists on three hours' sleep, the cold got worse. Then a scratchy-voiced peroration in New Jersey; then a hop to Roanoke for an open-air address that added another line to his crowded medical chart: a high fever, something to enjoy on the predawn flight back halfway across the continent to Omaha, Nebraska.

As the day of the debate approached, Nixon was swallowing drowsy-making antibiotics, but still losing sleep; fortifying himself against weight loss with several chocolate milk shakes a day, but still losing weight; losing color; adding choler. He looked pale, awful.

His staff offered practice sessions. Nixon barked that he already knew how to debate. He was underwhelmed by the event at any rate. "Television is not as effective as it was in 1952," he had told a journalist. "The novelty has worn off."

Kennedy prepared like a monk. The afternoon of the showdown, he capped off the last of the three intensified practice sessions with a fortifying nap, piles of index cards covering him like a security blanket.

While Kennedy slept, Nixon campaigned in front of another hostile union crowd. His TV advisers became increasingly frenzied as the appointed hour approached; they were kept away from him, and weren't able to brief him on the debate format. Nixon took a single phone call of advice, from his vice-presidential candidate, Henry Cabot Lodge.

The hour arrived. For security, the candidates were driven directly inside the studio building. One wonders what distraction inspired Richard Nixon's awkward egress that ended with his smashing his bad knee once more on the car door's edge. His facial reaction was recorded for posterity: "white and pasty."

Kennedy emerged from his car looking in a producer's recollection like "a young Adonis." (That the young Adonis, but for a dangerous schedule of pharmaceuticals, was sick as an old man was for future generations to find out.) He kept his suit fresh by slipping into a robe. He walked out onto a terrace, sunlight dancing on his skin, paced back and forth, all coiled energy, punching his palm with his fist: the challenger.

In the other corner, the reigning heavyweight debating champion, weihing in at -

(Eight pounds less than it took to fill the shirt he was wearing.)

His people had begged Nixon to let them buy him a new one. He stubbornly refused. An aide had slathered a species of make-up over a portion of his face - a product called Lazy Shave, cadged at the last minute from a corner drugstore, to cover up his day's beard growth. The concession was no doubt ascribable to Herblock's infamous caricatures in the Washington Post. They'd rendered Nixon's "five o'clock shadow" a national laughingstock.

The panel of reporters introduced themselves. And Howard K Smith of ABC intoned, "In this discussion, the first of a series of four joint appearances, the subject matter, it has been agreed, will be restricted to internal, or domestic, American matters." He called the Democrat to begin with his opening statement; and the Democrat opened up, staring stalwartly into the camera, with a sucker punch.

And they called Dick Nixon the dirty one.

"We discuss tonight domestic issues. But I would not want that to be - any implication to be given that this does not involve directly our struggle with Mr Khrushshev for survival." Kennedy was bending past the breaking point the spirit of the two campaigns' formal agreement to focus the first debate on domestic issues and talking about what Nixon was not yet primed to discuss: foreign policy. The distraction was brilliant. It left Nixon with two immediate choices - calling the foul and looking as if he were ducking, or letting Kennedy get away with looking like he was controlling the debate.

So Kennedy essentially pulled the 1960 equivalent of Sarah Palin's infamous "I'm not gonna answer any questions, I'm gonna talk right to the American people." Nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

Last November, the BBC aired a documentary about the debate. Its host and researcher was Andrew Marr, the BBC's chief political correspondent, a man who would put any of our political pundits and commentators to shame.

Marr prefaced the actual debate, with background about how Kennedy, essentially, ratfucked Hubert Humphrey in order to win the West Virginia primary, by getting his operatives to push the lie that Humphrey was a conscientious objector during the second World War. The story stuck, a precursor to Lee Atwater's assertion that perception is reality.

But more important, this is what Marr found out about that iconic first debate:-

When I met some of those involved, including Kennedy's TV adviser in 1960, I came away freshly awestruck by his presentational audacity.

For instance, in that first debate, Kennedy politely excused himself for a "comfort break" a minute before the two men were live on air. He did not come back.

As the studio manager was counting down the final seconds to going live, everyone - Nixon included - was aghast. Just as the count ended, there was Kennedy, smiling at the podium. "Psyching" an opponent doesn't get smarter than that.

And yet… Kennedy beat Nixon not simply with his ads, his sound bites, his jingles, the carefully posed photographs and the downright lies he told about his health. He beat Nixon by not standing for anything beyond rousing banalities.

On the "missile gap" with the Russians, Kennedy knowingly hyped the danger. Nixon, as vice-president, knew the real facts but also for reasons of national security, could not reveal them. (And Kennedy probably knew that, too.)

On the other great issue - civil rights - the Kennedy team sent one message to black audiences and another to middle America.

Did it matter? I came away thinking the mix of big money, smearing, a feel-good blur where policy should have been, and the selling of the candidate like soap flakes, added up to a fairly shameful record.

Even then, he barely won. The younger Nixon, who was liberal on race and more economically mainstream than he became, could well have made a good earlier president.

In office Kennedy made some terrible overseas blunders (though kept his nerve over the Cuban missile crisis) and was slow on domestic policy, particularly civil rights. Had he lived longer, I think he would have had a lower presidential reputation.

The 1960 campaign is not the story I had expected. It's a far more interesting one. It has been obliterated by those images of the handsome young father and husband, then the young king cut down in his prime.

But today we live in a world that has become profoundly cynical about politics. I think we owe it to ourselves to look past those images and ask: aren't there better ways of doing democracy than Kennedy's?

So all Perlstein's rhetoric that Kennedy swept Nixon into a sweat with his soaring and confident liberal punches was pure spin, delivered to a hack posing as a viable political interviewer and strengthening the assertions of a girl reporter so tongue-tied she couldn't articulate a sentence clearly. Why? To spin pejoratively the current Democratic President as ineffective and - in Harriet Christian's words, "an inadequate black man."

If you want to know there "historian" Rick Perlstein stands on Obama, check this out. Troll along the commentary enough and get past the adolescent "I am Spartacus" shite, and you'll find that what he hates most about the President is that he's "arrogant."

Well, Yankee Boy, I'm a Southern girl, and where I come from, "arrogant" is Northern for "uppity." You'll also find that Marse Rick lives in the President's old Chicago neighbourhood.

So for insightful commentary, good old reliable (not) Chris Matthews gets a slip of a lass off the rag of Her Serene Highness Queen Ratfucker Omnipotent of Medialand and someone who's clandestinely (unless you look at his Facebook page) hostile (and maybe racially so) to the President.

And you use them to compare him to FDR and Kennedy. FDR, born into American aristocracy, born to lead and rule, the liberal icon whom today's EmoProgs conveniently forget did jack-holy-shit for African Americans - indeed, who compromised with the Southern tranche of a 70 plus Democratic Senate majority in order to pass social welfare legislation which denied any coverage to that racial demographic. The same FDR, the Japanese-Caucasian Alex Wagner should note, interned the Nisei in concentration camps during the second World War.

And, yes, Chris Matthews is right to point out that Richard Nixon, as President, wanted to effect employer-based universal healthcare ... but was scuppered from doing so by Ted Kennedy in the Senate, whom he'd approached to help craft the legislation.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that a person is entitled to his own opinion, but he isn't entitled to his own fact. It's scurvy enough to spin current affairs to suit a particular agenda; it's worse to spin the past to suit the same. Even worse, is when someone who touts himself as a historian does this, as a means to achieve an end.

It's not clever. It's scurvy. And it's the secular version of what David Barton is doing on the right, but for the same purpose.

Politics certainly does turn up strange bedfellows.

Anyway, for anyone who's interested, here's the first debate from the 1960 election, in its entirety:-

Clowns to the Left of Him, Jokers to the Right

So here we are at the end of a long, hot summer (at least in Britain - how's that for an oxymoron), after an August of scorching and offtimes ridiculously ignorant debates about a topic which has suddenly become urgently de rigeur in the United States: healthcare reform.

It really has been the silly season back home - embarrassingly so for me. Living in Europe, I've just come off 8 years of trying to convince people this side of the Pond that not all Americans were as certifiable as the neocons in possession of the bully pulpit, allegedly duly elected representatives, indicating the will of the people. Just about the time when I can put my head above the figurative parapet and attempt to wave a US flag, I'm confronted with the absurd Town Maulings.

Universal healthcare in Europe is a given. It's been around a long time. In fact, it's so much taken for granted by citizens of the countries where it's established, that many citizens complain vigourously about the quality of the healthcare they receive; and even though they wouldn't be without the universal healthcare that they have, the naysayers trying to discredit Obama as a socialist/communist/fascist/illegal alien/the Devil incarnate listen to their bleatings across the Atlantic and embellish upon them, using this spin as fodder to fuel the fires of fear amongst the lowest common denominator of voters in the States.

After all, better the devil you know than the devil you don't, even if you didn't realise that the devil that gave you Medicare just might be the government.

That's the ignorance of the Right - ugly, hideously white, quasi-illiterate,faith-based, excluding and intolerant and all in the name of Christianity.

That's the base ignorance which comes as a result of poor education, which resides in provincial and rural communities, usually found in the Deep South or in the sparsely-populated Western states, the stuff of people raised on a diet of Civil War stories and survivalists. The stuff of Timothy McVeigh, the paranoia that stoked Columbine, the sort of misappropriated loyalty that equates the Pro-Life campaign with the Pro-Death approval of the death penalty.

But the Right isn't the exclusive domain of ignorance, for ignorance resides on the Left-hand side of the American street as well; and in many ways, it's just as ludicrous, just as loud-mouthed, just as close-minded and just as intolerance. This brand of ignorance is uglier, because most of its proponents are educated, presume to be intelligent, and, quite frankly, should know better.

Of course, it's all about healthcare reform. What isn't, nowadays? For the shills of the Far Left, the self-proclaimed Progressives (who are anything but), Obama has done nothing right since taking office on January 20th. First there was the Wall Street bail-out, then the compromise with the Republicans on the Stimulus Package. There was the bi-partisan approach altogether, and now healthcare. Sprinkled amongst all that, Obama's neglected to legalise marijuana, repeal Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell and rescind the Defence of Marriage Act.

But healthcare's taken as much a centre stage for these people as it has for opponents of reform; and they just might, unwittingly, unite to kill it off entirely.

According to these people, Obama should have let the banks tank and at the same time, magically pull jobs from a magician's top hat. Do they not realise that, had Wall Street not been given a lifeline, there would be no jobs full stop, never mind magical ones pulled from magical hats. The United States economy would simply stop ... along with most of the major economies of the developed world. Of course, everyone deplores the greed engendered by Wall Street and the ethos of bonus that thrives there, but without the banking industry, where would the basic economy be?

These are people who, wrongly, believe that the greener grass of Europe is a haven of socialism.

Wrong.

European countries are beehives of capitalism. In fact, capitalism first came of age in England. The emergence of the English middle class signaled the end of the Middle Ages and heralded the dawning of a new sort of Renaissance. The noblesse oblige of France gave way to the noblesse de robe and, by extension, the solid bourgeoisie, or ... middle class. The only vestiges left of socialism are the healthcare systems - eclectic throughout Europe in design - and the public transport systems in each country, which vary from the sublime of France and Germany, to the ridiculously expensive in the UK.

The battle-cry of the some on the Progressive Left, regarding healthcare, is 'single-payer.' Single-payer or nothing. Forget the Third Way (ineffectual at the best of times, in my opinion), single-payer is the only way.

But it's not. And, I ask ... do they understand it? Do they understand that 'free at source' doesn't really mean ... 'free'? When they cry out that 'the government pays, that's what "single-payer" means,' do they understand where the government gets the money to pay for this medical care?

They get it from taxes, which will have to be raised across the board. Not the rich, not corporations. Everyone. Proportionately, yes - after all, to each according to his ability - but raised still.

I've lived under a single-payer system for 28 years. Simply put, on a good day, it works; on a bad day, it sucks. It's the luck of the draw, or rather, the luck of where you live. Live in an area where your local health authority has managed its budget well, and you'll never know a waiting list or anything less than a pristine hospital. Live where the bureaucrats who administer the authority's budget are feckless, and you'll have services cut, waiting lists months long and MRSA-infected hospitals with six-bed, mixed wards.

They'll grudgingly accept a 'public option', a vaguely-expressed version of they hybrid public-private combination popular throughout Southern Europe. This actually makes these sorts seem a bit more sensible. It at least tells me they're aware of the fact that Medicare only covers 80% of medical expenses and extending Medicare for all, would need a private top-up option added. (Of course, this is in opposition to the shills shouting 'Medicare for all' as a single-payer option, without stopping to think that 'Medicare for all' would mean 'all' would have to cough up the balance.

Then there's an idiot, shouting on another site, about getting rid of insurance companies entirely. Entirely. Presumably, this person doesn't drive a car or live in a house, which might burn or be damaged by a storm or hurricane. Presumably, he doesn't travel or own anything of value that might be lost or stolen, much less value his life in the event he has a family for whom provision might have to be made in the unlikely event of his death. Because all of the above would entail insurance, which would mean he would, in the words of the Wicked Witch of the North, kinda sorta, you know, need insurance companies.

Single-payer's the answer. Public option, maybe. Employer-based and co-operatives is a sell-out to Big Pharma and Big Business.

And this is when my head really begins to explode with anger, because in the midst of all this pandemonium, chaos, confusion and outright lies that have dominated the better part of the summer, this lot, the Left, the so-called Progressives, are ready to throw Obama under the political bus, walk away, denounce him as a traitor. Just like that. After 8 months.

I'm sorry, but even if Jesus Christ were the Son of God, even he wouldn't be able to undo in 8 months what it took the asswipes who raped our Constitution and instituted a rule of thuggery 8 years to achieve.

Already, on some sites there is talk of hoping there might be a primary challenge to Obama's leadership in 2012. Who could it be? Some say Hillary, who's repeatedly said she won't run at 65. Some are even hopeful of Ralph Nader, as if the United States would profit from having an 80 year-old at the helm - not to sound ageist, but one would live in hope that his Vice President would be considerably younger.

And these selfsame people sneered at Sarah Palin for being a quitter.

Obama never had the Right. From the getgo, they would always be against him. He's losing the Centre, because the Centre are confused as to what sort of healthcare plan he has in mind; and, quite honestly, that's Obama's fault for not having something, if not concise, at least a concrete, if rudimentary, plan about how to approach this reform. Yet I can understand his reticence to do so, considering the resounding bitchslap the Democratic Congress gave the Clintons in 1993, when they presented a healthcare plan fait accompli.

Obama, the Constitutional lawyer, is making government work the way government should work: Congress was called upon to legislate, to formulate an cost-effective universal healthcare package, even though, as I said on Bill Maher's forum, Congress is, at best, dysfunctional at the moment. It's polarized between the Right wingnut theocrats and a Democratic caucus that's at once high on the fact that they've gained the bully pulpit and suspicious of each of its own diverse factions within itself.

Forgive my Lincoln moment, but a House divided against itself cannot stand (the Democrats), and you can't please all the people all the time (healthcare and the President). Sometimes I think Lincoln was the last sane Republican; and look what happened to Lincoln.

I'm reading James Carville's latest book at the moment, 40 More Years, and one thing strikes me: Throughout the book, Carville refers to the Republicans as just that - 'the Republicans' or 'the Republican Party.' On the other hand, when he speaks of the Democrats, he refers to them as 'the Democratic caucus' or 'the Democratic coalition,' and those epithets ring true. Coalitions are weak at the best of times, and the Democrats are as culturally diverse as America, itself. All you needed to do was scan the sea of faces at each of the national conventions last year. Which one most closely resembled the America you know? And which one looked like the America of the 19th Century?

Exactly.

Earlier this summer, my socio-political muse, Bill Maher, was interviewed by Howard Kurz on CNN. During the interview, Kurz briefly mentioned the tea party phenomenon and the fact that some statements emanating from that movement were veering into the realms of a fascist fantasy. However, this was Freedom of Speech. He asked Bill about the First Amendment, and Bill made a remark that, for lack of a better word than a British one, gobsmacked Howard Kurz. Bill remarked that in travelling about, he noticed a worrying trend amongst younger people, specifically those on college campuses. More than the Right wingnutters, or at least just as much, college students on the Left were calling for a denial of Freedom of Speech. In short, they wanted to squelch dissent. I don't know what baffled and astounded Bill more - the fact that these people wanted to rescind this basic right, or the fact that they clearly were unfamiliar with the Constitution, which is probably why Bill was led to surmise that America was a stupid country.

And that surmisal pains me ... not because I disagree with Bill, because I did, at first; but now I agree. Because I see ignorance on the Left as well as the Right. There's a difference, however. The Right revere Sarah Palin and cult of willful ignorance, which denotes intellectual elitism as something pejorative and not to be trusted. These people revel in what they don't know and wear it proudly as a badge of honour, clinging to their guns and their religion in defence of this.

The Left, well, the Left are like those pseudo-intellectual wannabe high school philosophers - the sort who swanned about the halls of high schools in the early 70s, clutching a copy of Lord of the Rings, whose bookmark never seemed to progress past the first third of the interminably boring story. It looked cool. So now it looks cool to pretend you understand and are familiar with the Constitution, while all the time you know as much about it as the wingnutters from the Right: jack shit.

And it's ok for you to call down the Right as stupid, blind, narrow-minded et al, whilst crying for the Republicans to be silenced on the one hand, and Obama to be sacrificed on the other. Their ignorance is more tragic, for they are blind to it, lost in a forest out of which they can't find their way, because there are simply too many trees.

Their ignorance is an ignorance of arrogance, where their way is the right way and they know better than anyone, irregardless of experience.

As my late mother would say, they won't be told.

People I've met on various internet sites and blogspheres, people from this type of Left, tell me I've been away from the US too long. I'm constantly being told that I don't know my own country, that I don't live here anymore, and, therefore, even though I possess a passport, pay taxes and vote regularly, I've no right to comment upon or even worry about any socio-economic or political situation in the United States. Well, I'll tell you what I DO know.

I know that never before in my sordid life on either side of the Atlantic, have I ever been spurred with a sense of optimism and hope as I was last year during the campaign of Barack Obama. I'd never seen a Presidential candidate that inspired me so much. I was beginning to wonder if any ever would.

My parents came of age during the Great Depression. My father cast his first vote for Roosevelt's second term in 1936; my mother's first vote came four years later when she voted for his third term. Both their families were suffering along with everyone else when Roosevelt told them they had nothing to fear but fear, itself. My dad went to war, and my mother learned to drive and worked his job, for twice the salary he earned. During the war, she and her sisters shut up their various houses and returned to live with my grandparents, so they could pool their ration cards.

Later, they were Kennedy Democrats, and, as a small child, I could sense their excitement when Kennedy won to ask us not what our country could do for us, rather that we should ask what we could do for our country. They grew up and matured under a notion of service and sacrifice, if the time required it. They may have grumbled a bit, but they simply got on with it, and they endured.

In his first show of the 2009 season, Bill touched upon this subject, wondering if the people of today had an inkling of an idea about service to the country, about responding when the President asked for their help in achieving some of the monumental tasks heaped upon him to achieve. Bill was pretty pessimistic about that, reckoning that our society today was lazy; they wanted instant gratification, and they wanted the President to 'do' everything for them to alleviate their suffering without doing anything in return. This was not, reckoned Bill, the same generation as the so-called Greatest Generation.

He's been proven right. This is what we're seeing now. People from both sides of the political coin, turning their back on a gifted, sensitive, caring and intelligent President. Inexperienced, you say? Who has the necessary experience for this Poisoned Chalice? In the past 30 years, we've had a peanut farmer, an actor, a patrician, a philanderer and a dolt. For the first time in my life, it seems as if we have a man in the Oval Office who genuinely cares about the people who've chosen him, as much as he cares about the people who haven't.

He's a human being, a man; he's fallible like we all are. He'll make mistakes and falter, but he's criticized even when he admits error; and he'll falter even more if those of us who voted for him just turn our backs and walk away, along with the birthers, the teabaggers, the Creationists and the old Confederacy. Good company, eh?

Just because they're the jokers on the Right, doesn't mean you should take pride in being the clowns on the Left. Maybe it's time the Democrats stopped falling in love and started falling in line a bit - hey, we could have a party, like, you know ... the Democratic Party.