- Imagine, if you will, Teresa Heinz Kerry or Hillary Clinton
going on national television and telling a joke about her husband masturbating
a horse.
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- And had that happened, imagine the reaction of some of
our more ardent moral preceptors such as Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Falwell,
Dobson, Savage and Bennett. The outpouring of pious flapdoodle would have
been of tsunami proportions.
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- But since it was Laura Bush who laid that shopworn gag
on the crowd at the White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner,
it was acceptable, because, well, because she and her husband go to church
regularly, and because Republicans are exemplars of moral values, the odd
off-color joke notwithstanding.
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- Laura didn't create the joke; it was put in by the man
who wrote her script; she just read the lines. Sure, the whole thing was
rehearsed and rehearsed again, but so what? Mrs. Bush handled it splendidly.
She even got in a shot at her battleaxe mother-in-law. Given her flawless
performance, Karl Rove might want to consider letting her handle the next
presidential live press conference. If there is one.
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- As good as Laura Bush was, the event's funniest line
wasn't delivered that night. It came a couple of days later from Elisabeth
Bumiller, The New York Times' White House correspondent. Writing of Mrs.
Bush's performance, Bumiller said: "She brought down a very tough
house." Right. The grandest collection of timorous toadies ever to
cover the White House.
-
- That said, we owe those "tough" journalists
a single debt of gratitude. Their obsequious treatment of Bush and Cheney
since the day they took office has done more to dispel the myth of a liberal
media elite than all the disclaimers in The Nation and American Prospect
combined.
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- As Robert Kennedy Jr. pointed out in a recent Vanity
Fair article, the far right not only has control of the legislative and
executive branches of government, it has virtual control of most of the
mass media. The extreme right controls talk radio. Conservative corporations
control the purse strings of the major television news operations, not
just Fox News, which is an unabashed organ of the Republican Party.
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- It was not by chance that Bob Schieffer was named moderator
of the final presidential debate last fall. As Kennedy noted, Schieffer
asked not a single question about the environment, concentrating instead
"on abortion, gay marriage and the personal faith of the candidates,
an agenda that could have been dictated by Karl Rove."
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- And who's to say it wasn't?
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- Shortly after he was named interim anchor of the CBS
evening news, Schieffer told a late night interviewer that if Bush can
bring our troops home from Iraq by Christmas he will go down in history
as a great president. Sure, forget what he and Cheney have done to the
economy, the environment, health care, the treasury and thousands of American
families mourning the loss of their sons, daughters and spouses. This disaster
of a president is one step away from becoming one with Lincoln, Washington
and Jefferson. Just ask Bob.
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- Kennedy quotes Bill Moyers, recently chased to the margins
of a newly Republican-dominated Public Broadcasting System: "We have
an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans,
and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore
we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American
people."
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- Amen.
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- Rossie is associate editor of the Press & Sun-Bulletin.
© 2005 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin
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- http://www.pressconnects.com/
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