The New Yorker's insipid "satirical" cartoon cover depiction of Barack Obama is not a new or surprising event. Where the national media are concerned, Democrats are what's for dinner.
In July 2000 the Atlantic Monthly published a vicious hit job on Democratic Presidential candidate Al Gore. Worse than an Orwellian lie fest, it was an assault on truth itself. It began
thusly:
Al Gore is the most lethal debater in politics, a ruthless combatant who will say whatever it takes to win, and who leaves opponents not just beaten but brutalized. But Gore is no natural-born killer. He studied hard to become the man he is today
by James Fallows
AL GORE has often been mocked for his speaking style -- even by himself, in wooden jokes about his wooden manner. He stopped telling those jokes a year or two ago. Through this year's presidential campaign he has become more aggressive and animated on the stump. Yet oratory is still classed among Gore's liabilities; like the elder George Bush in 1988, he is a Vice President who inevitably suffers when his speeches are compared with those of a sitting President with unusual rhetorical gifts.
But Gore has accomplished something Bush never did. Over the course of the 1990s, so gradually and methodically that it was not fully appreciated, Gore emerged as America's most lethally effective practitioner of high-stakes political debate. Political debate is not, of course, like other forms of debate. It is not primarily a dispassionate contest of logic, in which ideas are pitted against each other to see which is most compelling. It is debate as political combat, in which the contest of ideas is subordinate to the struggle for dominance between the debaters. Victory requires knowing all the details of the opposition's proposals, and it's no surprise that Gore should excel at that. But it also requires a taste for face-to-face confrontation, and a sense of showmanship. In these, too, Gore has, less predictably, excelled.
Debate has also been the medium in which Al Gore has displayed the least attractive aspects of his campaigning style: aggressiveness turning into brutality, a willingness to bend the rules and stretch the truth if necessary. A generation ago Gore was a divinity student who said he was repelled by the harsh realities of politics. Now he is the political combatant most likely to leave his victims feeling not just defeated but battered. He is also the one best able to change, purely through debate, the momentum of a political or policy contest.
Note the author - James Fallows. Fallows was an unquestioned prestige journalist, but that did not stop him from writing a screed in which - to paraphrase Mary McCarthy - every word was a lie, including and and the.
It was a sick display of hatchet jobbery from the very top of our literary/journalistic food chain, and it forshadowed the depths to which our establishment would sink in order to install George W. Bush as "President."
Now, as promised, here is the cover for that story:
The Atlantic is forever shamed. And as for its editor at that time, Michael Kelly, I'll bet his ears are burning - along with the rest of him.
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