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Caveat lector
 | THE WEBLOG YEARS! Sully scolds Dowd for clipping a quote. Too bad he did the same thing: |
SATURDAY, MAY 31, 2003
BEND IT LIKE SULLIVAN: We’ve tried to ignore Andrew Sullivan’s posturing about Maureen Dowd’s recent error, but Friday’s foolishness put us over the top. A Texas newspaper has dropped Dowd, Sully says, because she misquoted President Bush. Sully quoted the newspaper’s statement, then began to pander. “Amen to that,” Sully said. “I wonder how many other papers who syndicate Dowd are reconsidering, given her propensity to deceive.”
For the record, Dowd did misrepresent something Bush said, though we wouldn’t swear she did it on purpose. Here’s what Dowd wrote in her May 14 column:
DOWD: Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. “Al Qaeda is on the run,” President Bush said last week. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated…They’re not a problem anymore.” [Dowd’s deletion]Since al Qaeda had just staged its Saudi bombings, Dowd used the quote to make Bush look dumb. But Bush hadn’t said that al Qaeda was finished; Dowd’s deletion had changed Bush’s meaning. Here was Bush’s full statement, including the part which Dowd clipped:
BUSH: Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely, being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.Clearly, Bush meant that the dead or jailed operatives are no longer a problem. Dowd’s edit changed Bush’s meaning.
Sully began to crow about this as soon as he spied it on other web sites. Yesterday, his posturing hit its zenith. The comedy? On the very day when Sully began thumping Dowd, he posted his review of The Clinton Wars. And right up front in that review, Sullivan clipped a Blumenthal quote, then said the clipped “quote” made Sidney look stupid. In other words, Sullivan did much the same thing he’s been flogging in Dowd for two weeks.
Let’s ignore the general fakery of Sully’s review. Instead, let’s zero in on his clipped quote. Early on, Sullivan wants to ridicule Blumenthal for worshipping at Clinton’s altar (it’s a Standard Hack Spin-Point). To accomplish this end, he quotes an early part of The Wars. Clinton is visiting FDR’s Hyde Park home right at the start of his presidency. Sully lets us know how stupid the passage is. “You’ll just have to take my word for it that I’m not making this following bit up,” he says. Then he quotes from Sid:
SULLIVAN (quoting The Clinton Wars): “An aide gently but insistently reminded [Clinton] that his time was limited. The turbulent world was tugging at him, starting with a boisterous crowd waiting at the local high school. ‘It’s so peaceful,’ Clinton whispered as he stared at the tomb. His mind was filled with great plans: universal healthcare, reducing the federal deficit, investments in education and the environment, cutting crime, remaking the welfare system, ending discrimination, to begin with.”Now the mockery starts. “To begin with?” Sullivan says. “What on earth would be next? A space colony on Mars? But to ask such questions of this book is to mistake its essence. To ask how Sid knew what was going on in the president’s mind at that moment, is also to miss the point.”
Sullivan mocks Blumenthal’s account. How could Blumenthal know “what was going on in the president’s mind?” he asks. Fairly clearly, we’re supposed to roll our eyes to think that Blumenthal would engage in such silly mind-reading.
But it’s perfectly clear from The Clinton Wars how Sidney “knew what was going on in the president’s mind.” Sullivan simply clipped his quote to keep his reader from knowing. Here’s the fuller quote from Blumenthal’s book—the fuller quote which plainly explains how Sidney could read Clinton’s mind:
BLUMENTHAL (page 8): An aide gently but insistently reminded [Clinton] that his time was limited. The turbulent world was tugging at him, starting with a boisterous crowd waiting at the local high school. “It’s so peaceful,” Clinton whispered as he stared at the tomb. His mind was filled with great plans: universal healthcare, reducing the federal deficit, investments in education and the environment, cutting crime, remaking the welfare system, ending discrimination, to begin with. “I believe that government must do much more,” Clinton had told a joint session of Congress on February 17, quoting repeatedly Roosevelt’s call for “bold, persistent experimentation.”Duh! How did Blumenthal know “what was going on in the president’s mind?” He knew because he was explicitly referring to Clinton’s just-completed speech to the Congress! Dowd clipped a quote to make Bush look silly; Sully did the same thing to Sid. But now, the loud little fellow is stroking his thigh, scoring Dowd’s “propensity to deceive.” Does anyone else maybe get the feeling that Sullivan bends it like Jayson?
IF YOU MISSED IT: Be sure to read yesterday’s HOWLER. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/30/03.
IT’S SO EASY: How easy is life as a hack pseudo-con? Life is extremely easy. For example, look at Sullivan’s “Weekly Dish” column in Friday’s Washington Times. Then look at Greg Pierce’s “Inside Politics” column in the very same paper. Sullivan opens with an item about John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times; Pierce opens with the same item. Pierce then does an item about the Texas newspaper dropping Dowd; Sullivan covers the Dowd matter too. You’d think Times readers would eventually tire, reading the same old stuff again and again. But no—and life is sweet for hack pseudo-cons, blessed with such robot-like readers.
The Daily update
THE WEBLOG YEARS: Presidential biographers have often read minds. In The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal mentions one of the greatest such writers:
BLUMENTHAL (page 196): Two days before I was twelve and four days before the 1960 election, my political education began. I would soon get as a birthday present the two hardcover volumes I had asked for—Carl Sandburg’s The Prairie Years, about Lincoln. Lincoln was the god of Illinois, the Prairie State.And Blumenthal was growing up right in that state! But no one ever read subjects’ minds the way Sandburg did at the end of those volumes. Lincoln, now elected, journeys for days “to say good-by and have his last hour with his stepmother, Sally Bush Lincoln:”
SANDBURG (volume II, page 417): Sally Bush and he put their arms around each other and listened to each other’s heartbeats. They held hands and talked; they talked without holding hands. Each looked into eyes thrust back in deep sockets. She was all of a mother to him.But how did Sandburg know what Sally Bush had been thinking? And how did he know that, as Lincoln rode in great parades in the east, “the sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength?” At a time when writers were permitted to write, such stupid questions occurred to no one. Now, “writers” spend their time cutting and pasting from other writers’ brilliant weblogs, and they express their puzzling, crabbed anger when all writers don’t hate Bill Clinton.He was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and wanting, wanting. He stroked her face a last time, kissed good-by, and went away.
She knew his heart would go roaming back often, that even when he rode in an open carriage in New York or Washington with soldiers, flags or cheering thousands along the streets, he might just as like be thinking of her in the old log farmhouse out in Cook County, Illinois.
The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and then there would be silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.