Where does spin come from? Starting with a January 13 piece in the Chicago Tribune, a potent new spin-point began making its way through your hapless press corps. Was the Enron mess a Republican scandal? Utter nonsense, this new spin-point said. But here, we’ll let Fred Barnes recite it. He spoke on Special Report:

The Tribune had run this same claim one day earlier. "Lay was no stranger to the Clinton White House," Stephen Hedges wrote, "playing golf with the president and staying overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom." This claim was, of course, Spin Magic. It tied an emerging GOP bogey-man, Lay, to an iconic Clinton "scandal," the Lincoln Bedroom. In the weeks that followed, the claim that Clinton hosted Lay in the Lincoln Bedroom was reported in an array of newspapers, and on a string of TV shows. It was being used as the perfect squelch to Democratic charges about Enron and Bush.

As you probably know, this charge was simply false. Ken Lay did not spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton years. Gene Lyons first noted this fact in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on February 13, and the Spinsanity gang furthered the reporting last Thursday in Salon. But where do potent spin-points like this come from? Spinsanity’s Brendan Nyhan missed one clue when he tracked the GOP’s new prize tale.

When the Tribune reported the Lincoln Bedroom canard, it cited no source for its claim. But two days later, the Washington Times’ Bill Sammon wrote this in the White House Weekly:

Uh-oh! Sammon seemed to trace the LB claim back to Drudge. And sure enough! On January 11, Drudge had put the bogus claim into play:

Drudge didn’t say "Lincoln Bedroom," but soon the potent spin-point was being widely bruited all the same. Let’s review the initial chronology:

The potent new spin-point was on the march. According to a LEXIS search, no one had voiced the claim before Drudge. For the record, Drudge’s claim that Enron hired McLarty was also false. No matter—major papers printed that canard too, and have recently begun posting corrections. One final point: as Lyons made clear in his recent piece, it was perfectly easy to find out that Drudge’s claim was utterly false. Journalists who repeated his claim either didn’t try to do a simple check—or were deliberately lying.

So where does spin come from? Let’s spell it out nice and plain. Dissemblers in the Bush White House (or at the RNC) decided they wanted to deceive you. So they handed a piece of disinformation to Drudge, and he compliantly typed ’er on up. Mysteriously, the very same falsehood turned up two days later in a news report in the Chicago Tribune. Fred Barnes recited the claim the next day; dittoes for Judy Keen, in USA Today. ("Lay played golf with Clinton, was an overnight guest at Clinton’s White House and advised the Clinton administration on energy issues.") Soon we were off the races. Once again, your dysfunctional press corps assured the nation of something that was simply false.

And people do get fooled by this conduct. Indeed, as the spin-point made its way through the press, something else began to appear—angry letters from American citizens who had been baldly deceived. In fact, the cattle were soon stampeding hard. On February 2, for example, Charlene Butts of New Caney, Texas sounded off in the Houston Chronicle:

Hmmm. Butts didn’t quite say that Lay got one of those LB stays. But Jack Greene of Portland, Oregon did, in the February 15 Oregonian:

Luckily, Greene was on to the "liberal media," who were trying to prevent Bush’s re-election. But then, many stampeding citizens had noticed the failure of local papers to report the Clinton-Lay Lincoln Bedroom scandal. On January 26, James Enright of Oakville, Missouri let the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have it:

Similar letters appeared in the Portland Oregonian, the Modesto Bee, the Daily Oklahoman, the Augusta Chronicle and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as readers complained about the press corps’ failure to report the Lincoln Bedroom matter. And if you’re a student of the way the press corps fools the public, you will surely chuckle about a letter which appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News:

Barnes was sure that Plessner was dissembling. Sadly, she was totally wrong. When did Ken actually lay across that big brass bed? In 1997, the Washington Post did a piece about President George H. W. Bush’s overnight guests. Stop us if you’ve heard this one:

We find the info less than shocking, but Lay accomplished his White House stay during the first Bush admin.

Readers, let’s summarize. Ken Lay snoozed in the White House under Bush. He did not stay in the White House under Clinton. But spinners got busy deceiving the public, and soon the cattle were running hard. We could always ask what our nation has done to deserve a press which takes "info" from Drudge. But that is the press corps we currently have. Our question for Barnes and all the rest: Why in the world does that happen?

Note: On Saturday morning, we asked the Tribune’s Hedges, plus co-authors Jeff Zeleny and Frank James, where they got the Lincoln Bedroom story. Could it be true—does the Tribune use information from Drudge? So far, no reply to our incomparable e-mails.

Teeing off with the enemy: What about Bill and Ken on the links? By all accounts, there was one such event, in August 1993. And yes, it sounds pretty sleazy. As usual, Bill was consorting with some real gangster types. Here’s the way the event was limned by the Washington Post’s NAMES & FACES:

This is the only Clinton-Lay golf game found on LEXIS. The information is easy to find; due to the manifest dangers of playing golf with Ford, Clinton’s daring attempt at outreach was widely reported. (What was the Secret Service thinking?) But a number of scribes got clever this month, making Bill and Ken’s round of golf plural. So it goes when your Washington "press corps" tries to tell you the stories it likes.

The Daily update (2/25/02)

Tail-gunner Andrew: Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan continues along as an upscale Drudge—or as a low-grade Joe McCarthy. Indeed, we’ve now reached the point where he quotes anonymous, hapless "economists" about how worthless poor Paul Krugman is. "Most days, I get an email from an economist, urging me to keep the heat on the shrill screeds of Paul ‘Enron’ Krugman," Sullivan wrote last Friday. He offered "a typical one" of these e-mails, which we quote in full:

Shall we start with the obvious? If Sullivan gets daily e-mails from these worried economists, couldn’t he offer a signed critique? All over America, people offer signed critiques of each other’s work every day. They appear as letters to the editor and as op-ed columns. They even appear as self-run web sites. No one is afraid to sign his name except, of course, for these trembling "economists." Maybe Sullivan’s "economists" are the same timid souls who won’t acknowledge their meetings with Cheney. (Trust us—they may well be the very same people.)

But then, it’s hardly surprising that Sullivan’s "economist" doesn’t want his or her name to be known. His or her complaints are simply bizarre. Here’s what Krugman said in the part of his column which the "economist" simply ground into dust:

Sullivan’s "economist" says Krugman’s all wet. "Doesn’t this guy check his facts anymore?" he or she says, more in sorrow than in anger. Paul was very good at one time, he or she wants you to know.

Let’s skip the drill on how those "rebate checks" worked, and cut right to the chase. Krugman’s disputed claim—that the "rebate checks" were really "advances on future tax cuts"—is about as controversial as the claim that the sky is blue and sometimes cloudy. Here, for example, is Evan Snapper (Ernst & Young) in the current Money magazine:

Here was Knight-Ridder’s Mark Schwanhausser on 2/19/02:

Maybe you prefer Ryan Donmoyer, Bloomberg News, 2/14/02:

Pamela Yip, Dallas Morning News, 2/4/02:

David Hendricks, San Antonio Express-News, 2/16/02:

MCCORMALLY: Remember last year’s tax-rebate bonanza, when $300 and $600 checks rained down on us?…The problem is that the rebate (although based on 2000 returns) was really an advance payment of savings resulting from the creation for 2001 returns of a 10% tax bracket for some of the money that used to be taxed at 15%.

You’re beginning to get the picture. "Few people understood that they were really getting a credit in advance instead of a rebate or refund," Yip said. One of those people was Sullivan’s "economist." Maybe he or she was really Howard Stern, mailing Sully to have some fun. Or maybe it was someone from the RNC, helping Sullivan in his increasingly bizarre propaganda campaign against the hapless Paul Krugman.

Sullivan quoted a second anonymous "economist" last Friday. "Please keep pounding on Krugman," the timorous tattle-tale told the Brave Brit. "I have known Paul for 25 years and once regarded him as one of the better, if not best, international economic theorists in the world. Alas his sojourn into being an op/ed columnist has totally perverted him." The same could be said for Sullivan’s unfolding adventure in rank propaganda. Sullivan has been an attack-dog hack for some time, but the last few months have been truly heinous. Now we’re reduced to anonymous attacks by invented "economists," designed to keep the cattle on the run. Drudge types up the low-brow stuff; Sullivan handles the high-end "economics." But don’t worry—whoever is making up Drudge’s stuff is doing the honors for Sullivan too. Or put it another way—whoever planned Richard Berke’s ludicrous story last week is also running Tail-Gunner Andrew. But so it goes in our phony "press corps," an institution increasingly devoted to transcribing spin for very powerful—and well-disguised—interests.