http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x313732*******QUOTE*******
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060220/alterman Lies About Blowjobs, Bad. Wars? Not So Much.
Eric Alterman
.... A true dichotomy between the public and the elite media can be found, on the other hand, on the subject of presidential lying. Excluding George Washington and perhaps Jimmy Carter, just about all Presidents have found it necessary to lie to the American people. And with those two exceptions, and possibly a few others, many have also found it necessary--or at least desirable--to fool around with women other than their wives. For reasons of culture and history, the mainstream media decided that both of these longstanding traditions had to end with Bill Clinton. ....
When Bill Clinton lied about a few blowjobs, the Washington press corps treated his actions as a threat to the Republic. As John Harris observes in his history of the period, The Survivor, on the night Clinton offered his prime-time, post-testimony national apology, network commentary was overwhelmingly negative. Calls for Clinton to resign reigned on pundit television and on the op-ed pages throughout the ordeal--often couched in terms of doing so "for the children." ....
Oddly, given the many obvious and quite consequential differences between a blowjob and a botched war effort, the Washington press corps appears to have reached a consensus that the former is a far more serious matter. Pundit "dean" David Broder, who whined that Clinton "trashed the place, and it's not his place," has declared himself uninterested in the question of whether Bush & Co. deceived Congress and the nation into its ruinous Iraq adventure. "This whole debate about whether there was just a mistake or misrepresentation or so on is, I think, from the public point of view largely irrelevant," Broder explained to his chum Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press. "The public's moved past that." Shortly thereafter Gloria Borger of U.S. News & World Report wondered why the topic was even being raised: "Ah, 'misleading.' Didn't we live through that argument already? In fact, wasn't that in the Democratic talking points in the 2004 election? Are we still arguing over who lied or did not lie about WMD?" she complained. It's shocking enough that pundits had less interest in Bush's prewar lies than, say, Oprah had in James Frey's rehab program, but it's more so that they can't be bothered to care now that the lies have been exposed. The explosive revelations in the Downing Street memo got relatively scant coverage, as did recent revelations of documents demonstrating that the phony story about the yellowcake uranium Iraq allegedly bought from Niger had been discredited long before Bush made his false pronouncements on the subject.
Underlying this attitude may be a simple matter of personal pique. While the punditocracy, much like a scorned lover, resented Clinton, it cannot shake its affection for Bush, no matter how much contempt he showers on their collective heads. As Chris Matthews proclaimed, "Everybody sort of likes the President, except for the real whack-jobs." Today the percentage of Americans who say they actually "like" Bush, according to a New York Times/CBS Poll, is 37 percent. ....
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