In a  blog at TNR last Friday, Eve Fairbanks intercepts a ball dropped by E. J. Graff at slate’s XX factor column, and runs with it. Her topic is the lamentable denouement of the candidate I myself championed, but it’s her capitulation to MSM binary-thinking wherein she betrays her (and by extension the whole MSM’s) biggest ongoing blindspot. In an en passant moment seeking comparative justification for MSM fixation on all things sexual and limited-litmus-test, supposedly “characterological” (while they scrub the heavy lifting of actual fact-checking of policy stances and implications), Eve makes a claim as if it were a given, one that far more lamentably characterizes the MSM in what should already be a post-bamboozled-by-Bush era, even if the MSM still gets nothing else right.  And yet … here’s Fairbanks:

The problem with only caring whether a politician’s “policies and votes are in order,” as E.J. puts it, is that the things a working politician confronts often have little to do with what he thought were his priorities. You couldn’t have predicted the outcome of Bush’s presidency by merely combing through his position on education in 2000. You’d have stood a better shot by considering his character traits, the ones that he would call on while handling Katrina or the aftermath of 9/11–not his sexual mores, but his stubbornness, his loyalty to his friends, his contempt for experts, his insularity, and so on. [bold added]  

Who, pray tell, Eve, is “You” here? Speak for yourself (and, alas, for your entire croniehood) …

As one who tried and struck out from the day of the GOP convention in summer of 2000 until that November to get even an emperor’s-clothes type letter to the editor printed about Bush’s appallingly transparently hypocritical education policy and non-track record, I curdled upon reading this way-too-typical MSM glossover.  

Dear Eve/MSM, of course you could have “predicted the outcome of Bush’s presidency by merely combing through his position on education in 2000.”  He masked, deceived, lied, misrepresented, and misconstrued: First, he took credit for something he’d had nothing to do with (the so-called “Texas miracle,” which itself was an overblown hype based on one year’s 4th grade math scores showing relative highest improvement, up from their previous cellar, thanks to some hard-earned payoff of the leadership of both Ann Richards and Ross Perot in instigating new state education priorities years before Bush had become towel-thwapping lightweight governor). 

Second and far worse, he drew chutzpah-laden erroneous conclusions from a Rand 2000 study of national education test scores (a study he waved about as if it were his credential to be the “education Prez” that Poppy had proclaimed himself and failed to be — premonitions there too of Iraq). That study had concluded three correlations existed to account for nationwide improvement in school achievement — universal public preschool, small class sizes (below 20) and hands-on equity of materials (books, computers) across classrooms. Did Bush stand for any of those means to improved schooling for all? Nary a one. Bush instead claimed his “credential” proved that his rightwing ideology (the schooling edition) was verified, the ideology that led disastrously, for our kids and our testing-beridden teachers as well, to the NCLB hoax and straitjacketing boondoggle.  His entire education ‘platform’ was laden with premonitions of hogwash writ not just national but international and which has led us to the across-the-boards mess we are in today.  In short, he [ignorantly or knowingly? which is worse?] misread the data, drew unsubstantiated conclusions.  And you all lapped them up.

But, remember well, Eve:  What blinded the press that year was chiefly and precisely the fact that you (the entire MSM) were driven by obsession with so-called “character issues” (read, sex) that year.  You were so busy bending over backwards to try in vain to teflonize yourself to the rightwing in full “They’re all liberals!” spurious attack against you that you fell for Bush hook, line, and sinker, never ever truly examined his record as Texas governor (vis-à-vis the environment any more than education, nor his business-cozy uber-gladhanding), and gave him a pass for presenting himself as the puritanical in the race.  Through him, you disassociated yourselves from sex which you implicitly and explicitly let Bush stick to Gore via attacks on his credibility and sub rosa tainting by association with Clinton and thus to sex (and distrust).  Bush lied and hid his policies while, Brer Rabbit-like, pointing your collective noses in the direction of what he trumped up as alleged lies by Gore for things Gore had never even said.  And you fell for it all.

No, Eve, you could tell everything you needed to about George Bush in 2000 by looking at his track record in public life in Texas.  You didn’t need to unearth a single private skeleton to see just what a gopher was looming large from the Texas oil fields where he’d also failed upwards.

When, I am left wondering, even after the bloom has been off the rose for at least the latter half (to date) of the Iraq quagmire, will the MSM ever display that it can really learn its lessons?  Not even in the rearview mirror do they (you) seem to have a clue where you went wrong.

[new metaphor alert: sports was then; the ER is now]

You see bandaids (for your own miserable failures of conscientious coverage of campaigns) where anyone who’s been paying any attention at all saw a need for transplant surgery a long long while ago.  You slap that bandaid over your boo-boo and keep thinking you are immunized all over again to repeat the same damn ditherings and rewritings of history, not ‘remembering’ that your ‘patient’ (the truth, the whole truth) died waiting in the ER hallway and never made it to the operating room.  We are bleeding to death out here from lack of responsibility by you, the MSM, to do your jobs.  Instead, you’re still rationalizing your blindspots after the fact.  How or when will you ever manage to see them before the damage is done, while the patient (the truth and your reader) is still in the waiting room, breathing and rescuable? 

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