I think he writes great stuff these days--and I cite his columns here often--but I wasn't aware that he was one of those in the media who participated in the trashing of Al Gore prior to the 2000 election. Mind you, I was a little more naive and a little less well informed back then. It was around that time that I was beginning to delve into exactly what The New York Times was reporting and to read blogs, such as "Media Whores Online" and "The Daily Howler" (Bob Somerby).
I firmly believe that the media did a horrible disservice to the country during the 2000 elections, and as a direct result we got George Bush for president and all the mess he has heaped upon us. I blame the media--even more than I blame the Supreme Court--for George Bush's getting into office (even though the Supreme Court made it 'legal,' despite Al Gore's getting the most votes).
We should never let off the hook--for the deaths and maimings of our soldiers and of all the Iraqi civilians in the unnecessary and failed Iraq War, sold to the American people on false pretenses (and not to mention all the other misfeasance and malfeasance of Bush's administration)--those reporters who participated in the trashing of Al Gore. And one of those was Frank Rich. From a recent article in Vanity Fair:
The seeds of Gore's caricature had been planted in 1997 when he, the presumptive candidate for 2000, made a passing comment about Erich Segal's Love Story, over the course of a two-hour interview with Time's Karen Tumulty and The New York Times's Richard Berke, for profiles they were writing. Tumulty recounts today that, while casually reminiscing about his days at Harvard and his roommate, the future actor Tommy Lee Jones, Gore said, It's funny—he and Tipper had been models for the couple in his friend Erich Segal's Love Story, which was Jones's first film. Tumulty followed up, "Love Story was based on you and Tipper?" Gore responded, "Well, that's what Erich Segal told reporters down in Tennessee."
As it turned out, The Nashville Tennessean, the paper Gore was referring to, had said Gore was the model for the character of Oliver Barrett. But the paper made a small mistake. There was some Tommy Lee Jones thrown in, too. "The Tennessean reporter just exaggerated," Segal has said. And Tipper was not the model for Jenny.
In her story, Tumulty and co-author Eric Pooley treated the anecdote as an offhand comment. But political opinion writers at The New York Times, it seems, interpreted the remark as a calculated political move on Gore's part. "It's somewhat suspicious that Mr. Gore has chosen this moment to drop the news—unknown even to many close friends and aides," wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?" Times columnist Frank Rich followed it up. "What's bizarre," he wrote, "if all too revealing … is not that he inflated his past but that he would think that being likened to the insufferable preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was something to brag about in the first place." [Emphasis added.]
I'm sorry, but I find it easier to excuse Hillary Clinton for voting for the resolution that led to the invasion of Iraq than to excuse the reporters who ganged up on Al Gore and helped Bush get elected in the first place. It is they who are ultimately responsible for all the death, destruction, maiming, misery, and disgrace to our nation that this presidential administration has brought on.
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