Curiouser and curiouser. Howell Raines, who lost his job as editor of the New York Times in the Jayson Blair scandal, actually tells the truth in today’s Guardian:
We are now enduring the third generation of Bushes who have taken the playbook of the “ruthless” Kennedys and amplified it into a consistent code of amorality. In their campaigns, the Kennedys used money, image-manipulation, old-boy networks and, when necessary, personal attacks on worthy adversaries such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. But there was also a solid foundation of knowledge and purpose undergirding John Kennedy’s sophisticated internationalism, his Medicare initiative, his late-blooming devotion to racial justice, and Robert Kennedy’s opposition to corporate and union gangsterism. Like Truman, Roosevelt and even Lincoln, two generations of Kennedys believed that a certain amount of political chicanery was tolerable in the service of altruism.Behind George W, there are four generations of Bushes and Walkers devoted first to using political networks to pile up and protect personal fortunes and, latterly, to using absolutely any means to gain office, not because they want to do good, but because they are what passes in America for hereditary aristocrats. In sum, Bush stands at the apex of a pyramid of privilege whose history and social significance, given his animosity towards scholarly thought, he almost certainly does not understand.
[…]
Starting with Senator Prescott Bush’s alliance with Eisenhower and continuing through the dogged loyalty of his son, George HW Bush, to two more gifted politicians, Presidents Nixon and Reagan, the family has developed a prime rule of advancement. In a campaign, any accommodation, no matter how unprincipled, any attack on an opponent, no matter how false, was to be embraced if it worked.
Amazing, for sure. No one in American journalism did more to put Bush in the White House than Raines. The Times was the one paper that could have killed off Rove's attacks on Gore as a flip-flopper who was loose with the facts. The Times was the one paper with the reputation and readership to have exposed Bush's background as a draft dodger, a business failure, a man in love with ignorance, a callous, brutal and indifferent governor, a friend of polluters, an enemy of women and minorities, a servant of Enron and crooked corporations in general, and, and, and… Instead, Raines's NYTimes subjeced us to a drumbeat of stories from the Bush campaign plane about the lovable, cuddly, nickname-bestowing frat boy you'd love to have a beer with if he hadn't been brave enough to swear off the stuff with a little help from Jesus. Gore, in Raines's world, wasn't a serious, hard-working Vietnam veteran and U.S. Senator and an expert on disarmament and the environment who had been the best Vice President in U.S. history. He was a stiff, awkward, unlikable robot who bored audiences to death and told lies to make himself look good.
Yeah, well, welcome aboard, Raines. I guess. But you're a pretty goddamned slow learner.
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on December 13, 2005 1:21 PMYes, especially since Kitty Kelley's essay at the same URL is the first I've heard a story of the Bush "rebirth": a personal meeting with the evangelist, whose reported glee in "saving" a vice president's son was unseemly.
A person who reads the quantity of political news I do shouldn't take for granted that Bush got carried away at a revival meeting, and I'm going to blame Howell Raines for that.
Posted by: Joyful Alternative on December 13, 2005 2:28 PM