No, George W. Bush isn’t Big Brother. Nor have
we reached the "war is
peace" stage of the 2004 presidential campaign,
although Dick Cheney’s
recent vote-Republican-or-die warning was a step
in that direction.
George Orwell’s anti-utopian satire, "1984,"
modeled upon Nazi Germany
and Stalinist Russia, depicted state control
of mass media somewhere very
different from where we’ve arrived. Americans
are deluged with so much
information, many can’t tell fact from fiction.
Ironically, one result can be a
state of mind Orwell called "collective solipsism,"
the unthinking belief that
truth is whatever the party line says it is.
Another is corrosive cynicism that says that since
all politicians lie and the
press can’t be trusted, it’s all a mystery. That
way lies the death of a democracy
already on life support. Consider recent media
flaps over the presidential
candidates’ long-ago military careers. No, military
experience shouldn’t be
a requirement for public office, but I don’t
agree with those who say re-fighting
Vietnam-era controversies is foolhardy. See,
it’s a character issue.
Who showed up, who took a powder? Who’s been
mostly telling the truth
about his military record, who’s been fudging?
The controversy also is a
case study in how news media function under pressure.
First came the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth, funded by Texas
oil men and construction moguls with long-standing
ties to Bush. Surely
they can’t all be GOP partisans, Bob Dole said.
In fact, they are.
Knight-Ridder recently reported how the organization
was put together.
Houston lawyer John O’Neill, first recruited
to attack John Kerry by
President Richard Nixon, hooked up with GOP political
operative Merrie
Spaeth. After raising cash, they hired a private
eye, who canvassed
thousands of swift-boat veterans for men who
resented Kerry’s
anti-Vietnam war activism. If that’s your issue,
they’re your guys. But
most served "with" Kerry only in the loosest
sense; the majority appear
never to have met him.
One conservative columnist derided Kerry’s "band
of brothers" as "handpicked,"
but didn’t mention who did the picking: the U.S.
Navy, in 1968. All swiftboaters
making appearances for the Kerry campaign served
on his boat—everybody
who did but one. That has to mean something.
Reporters who probed allegations that Kerry’s
medals were undeserved have
falsified them by every known method. Consider
fellow swift-boat commander
Larry Thurlow. He claimed that no firefight took
place during the incident that
earned Kerry the Bronze Star. He said Kerry’s
rescue of Special Forces
Sgt. Jim Rassmann from the Bay Hap River took
no courage. But Rassmann,
a Republican, remembers enemy fire. So does everybody
on Kerry’s boat.
Turns out Thurlow earned the Bronze Star in the
same action. The citation says
his boat was shot full of holes. Confronted with
the evidence, Thurlow claimed
that his ex-wife took the documents. Besides
Kerry’s crew, three sailors, including
a crewman on Thurlow’s own boat, have disputed
his account. None supports him.
Now Thurlow says Swift Boat TV ad producers pressured
him to say that Kerry
fled from action that day, but he refused. It’s
a sad story.
Then there’s CBS News’ discovery of "CYA" memos
allegedly written in 1972
by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush’s Texas Air National
Guard commander, ordering
him to take a flight physical he never took and
expressing unease with political
pressure being exercised on Bush’s behalf. Fearing
damage to the president’s
fly-boy image, the "Drudge Report" and other
conservative Web logs sprung into
action, citing "experts" who called the memos
forgeries written on a computer,
not a 1970s-era typewriter.
Almost overnight, CBS’ competitors ran with the
story. Upon further review,
those experts turned out to be all wet. The documents
could have been written
on IBM Selectrics, common office equipment. More
elaborate objections were
raised. Expert opinion aside, certitude is impossible
on typography alone.
CBS is standing fast, citing lots of circumstantial
evidence.
So what to think? Keep your eye on the big picture.
As USA Today points out,
"Neither the White House nor former officers
in the Texas National Guard have
challenged the central assertions in the documents:
that Bush’s performance as a
pilot was under scrutiny by commanders beginning
in 1972 and that Killian, his
supervisor, was unhappy with him." It found another
purported Killian memo
challenging Bush’s flight certification. At the
same time, The Associated Press
has learned, Bush was downgraded from piloting
F-104 fighters to flying second
seat on T-33 trainers. Next, he was grounded
altogether. CBS News appears
determined to find out why. By now, it has almost
as much at stake as the White
House, which has clearly dissembled about Bush’s
military record. Remember,
CBS broke the first story disproving the administration’s
assurances of "no warning"
before 9/11. It also exposed the abuses at Abu
Ghraib. Somebody’s going to win
this fight, and somebody’s going to lose it.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
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