BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Joe Conason's non-hypocritical
Spy piece. Media Log has obtained a copy of Joe Conason's
1992 article for Spy on the alleged infidelities of George
H.W. Bush - the subject of much chortling over the weekend by
Mickey
Kaus, given
Conason's
outrage over the John Kerry
sex rumors.
As I suspected,
the so-called hypocrisy Kaus thought he had unmasked was anything
but. Yes, Conason did indeed give a full - a very full -
airing to longstanding rumors that the first President Bush liked to
cat around. But Conason did it entirely in the context of the sexual
witch hunt to which the media had subjected Bill Clinton and,
earlier, Gary Hart. Conason wrote:
But the media deflowering
of "Gennifer with a G," cabaret singer, former Arkansas state
employee and self-proclaimed (and, for snitching about it,
handsomely paid) Bill Clinton sex partner, again poses the problem
that agitated the press during the 1988 election: If stories about
womanizing could ruin Gary Hart and cripple Clinton (not to
mention Senator Chuck Robb), then why isn't anybody looking into
the stories about George Bush?
And this, in the windup toward the
end:
Even more to the point is
that the Republicans have not hesitated for an instant to employ
such information against their opponents. They have been involved
in the exposure of Bill Clinton, and the GOP is reported to have
three dozen researchers working full-time to produce even more
dirt. There is, or there ought to be, such a thing as a level
playing field.
Certainly it's past time for
American politics to grow up and reach a point where stories about
our leaders' sex lives are treated as the titillating, perhaps
largely irrelevant trivia they usually are. But that maturity will
never be achieved as long as the public is permitted to see the
messy human truth only about Democrats, while Republicans are
displayed inside a bubble of happy, wholesome illusion.
Is that clear enough, Mickey? Of
course, since he was relying on a USA Today description of
Conason's article, it's likely that he hadn't even read it.
posted at 12:32 PM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
