New
Fiction From Bill Clinton and the New York Times
Commentary by Greg Lewis / Washington Dispatch.com
June 22, 2004
A couple of candidates for the Ignobel Prize for
Fiction have surfaced in the past week or so, just in time for the summer
beach reading crowd: Bill Clinton's My Life and the New York Times' reporting
on the 9/11 commission findings. Add a recent Maureen Dowd editorial based
on a moral equivalency so outrageous it's difficult to imagine even Dowd
could have come up with it, and the past week was replete with examples
of why you never want your son or daughter to work on a Democrat's staff
or grow up reading left journalism without an interpreter.
We would expect nothing less than egregiously self-serving
smarm (to back-form a noun based on the adjective "smarmy")
from Bill Clinton. Nor would we expect Maureen Dowd to suddenly demonstrate
intellectual integrity. But it's really difficult to have the message
drummed in day after day that the New York Times is no longer a functioning
newspaper in any meaningful sense of the word. I know, I know, I've been
watching the Times slide down the slippery slope that characterized the
tenure of the recently terminated Howell Raines just like everyone else;
but despite that, I guess I still find it tough to believe that journalistic
standards have gone completely out the window at so venerable an institution.
OK, the 9/11 Commission Report was important news, but
I kept waiting for someone at Shinnecock Hills Country Club, where the
U.S. Open Golf Tournament was played over the past weekend, to do something
politically incorrect, so the Times could send out its crack cadre of
a dozen or more reporters — reporters who cut their teeth on the
Master's brouhaha stirred up by Martha Burke — to really do justice
to news America needs to know about. "We've temporarily suspended
coverage of the 9/11 Commission Report to bring you news from the golf
course" were words I expected to read in the Gray Lady nearly every
day.
Alas, the Times was forced to cover the Commission's report
after all. And cover it the Times did. They might as well have buried
it under a pile of coal dust, so effectively did they cover it, and so
different from the Commission's findings was the reporting on them done
by Times writers. The Times' fictionalized account of the 9/11 Commission's
findings focused on two things, neither of which was part of the report,
or, for that matter, of history.
A June 20 story under Christine Hauser's byline contained
this lead: "The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission reiterated today
that they did not see any evidence of a collaborative relationship between
Al Qaeda and Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and that this position did not differ
from the view of the Bush administration." Two sentences later, Ms.
Hauser wrote that the lack of a collaborative relationship "seemed
to weaken one of the main justifications for the decision to invade Iraq
last year and overthrow Mr. Hussein." Hell, it's not even good fiction;
it's fiction that contradicts itself. I would suggest that in the next
installment of her serial novel, Ms. Hauser (and other on the Times staff
who are collaborating in perpetrating such fabrications) at least re-read
their material and remove internal contradictions. Shouldn't we expect
the Times' fiction editor to demand at least that much?
Even Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission Chariman, was moved
to comment on how inaccurate the Times' coverage of his Committee's findings
was. He was forced to reiterate several times that the Bush administration
did not claim a collaborative relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein. He also repeated what all but the most adamant fictionalizers
of recent events have known for months: There were multiple contacts between
Saddam Hussein's regime and agents of Al Qaeda.
In the midst of the flap over the fictionalized reporting
on the commission report came advance pub about Bill Clinton's new novel,
My Life. Among the most interesting fabrications in the book was Clinton's
claim that he had sex with "that woman, uh, Ms. Lewinsky" simply,
in his words, "because I could." Now one wouldn't expect the
writer of a potboiler to delve too deeply into his main character's motivations,
even given that the main character is a surrogate for the writer. But
not to present his protagonist as a silly, immature doofus with an absolutely
adolescent notion of human sexuality makes Clinton's roman a clef even
less believable than the events it fictionalizes. Indeed, this reviewer
found the former Prexy's performance far from convincing and so far from
the truth as to stretch even the boundaries of historical fiction. I'm
certain most of his readers will simply not let him get away with the
inaccuracies contained in My Life.
Rounding out a week in which the New York Times once again
topped itself as the nation's leading purveyor of misinformation for the
purpose of sabotaging the re-election of George W. Bush was a column by
Maureen Dowd entitled "Because They Could." Ms. Dowd, in a mind-boggling
moral equivalency that has to rank among the most daring fictions ever
perpetrated, wrote that "[t]he Clinton alpha instinct on Monica,
fueled by a heady cocktail of testosterone and opportunism, was the same
one that led W into his march of folly with Iraq."
Well, I guess so. Given that Saddam Hussein spent most
of his time in the West Wing, hobnobbing with President Bush, trying to
get him to make war on Iraq, I guess you could make that comparison. What
was Bush supposed to do? Ignore Hussein's overtures. When a dictator repeatedly
flaunts his iniquity in front a guy, what's wrong with the guy taking
the opportunity to amass a force of 250,000 or so soldiers and the arms
and equipment and supplies to support them outside the dictator's digs
and, well, just saying 'yes' to the opportunity. No red-blooded, testosterone-driven
President could resist, I'm sure we all agree.
And so, the good news is that there's a lot of interesting
fiction available for your reading this summer. The bad news is that it
comes from highly unreliable sources. About the only advice this reviewer
has to give to them: Don't believe everything you write.
Greg Lewis is the co-author of the Warner Books hardcover
"End Your Addiction Now."
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