A fallen culture

Somberby puts "th-gate" into proper perspective.

He also gets to the bottom -- and that is the proper word -- of the false quote of Kerry's regarding NASCAR that is flogged by the Times about every three weeks. Writes the incomperable Somerby:

WHO AMONG US DOESN’T LOVE FUNNY COMMENTS: Of course, we all know what a big dumb-ass John Kerry is! We know because Frank Rich told us in his September 5 column:

RICH (9/5/04): Mr. Kerry, having joined the macho game with Mr. Bush on the president's own cheesy terms, is hardly innocent in his own diminishment. From the get-go he’s tried to match his opponent in stupid male tricks. If Mr. Bush clears brush in Crawford, then Mr. Kerry rides a Harley-Davidson onto Jay Leno’s set. When the Democrat asks “Who among us does not love Nascar?”...he is asking to be ridiculed as an ''International Man of Mystery.”

Kerry was “asking to be ridiculed,” Rich said, and the mighty Times has been there to oblige him. “Who among us doesn’t love NASCAR!” A Times reporter, Timothy Egan, also mocked Kerry’s comical line on August 22. Indeed, the plummy line was such vintage Kerry that Sheryl Gay Stolberg couldn’t forget it. She couldn’t get the line out of her head. She said so on July 30:

STOLBERG (7/30/04): To anyone who has listened to Mr. Kerry extemporize at length—who among us can forget his “Who among us doesn’t like Nascar?” remark?—the thought of the Brahmin from Boston disdaining speechwriters and trying humor seemed odd, shall we say, for the most important address of his career.

It was simply delish to see the scribe wittily playing on Kerry’s remark! Five days earlier, John Tierney had cited the Kerry quote too, as part of a comical quiz on the solon. And of course, no one tweaks the high-and-plummy quite the way Maureen Dowd does. At the Times, she was first to mock Kerry’s silly locution, noting it in her March 18 column. Dowd, of course, is a brilliant scholar. For her, the solon’s comical quote quickly brought Austen to mind:

DOWD (3/18/04): Mr. Kerry is Pride...
Even when he puts on that barn jacket over his expensive suit to look less lockjaw—and says things like, “Who among us doesn't like Nascar?”—he can come across like Mr. Collins, Elizabeth Bennet’s pretentious cousin in “Pride and Prejudice.”

Dowd clued us to Kerry’s “smugness” and “stupidity” this day. She was the first to savage his statement—the stupid statement that, alas, John Kerry may not have made.

Yes, according to the Nexis archive, this statement seems to start with Dowd. There is no prior record of Kerry saying “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR” or “Who among us doesn’t love NASCAR,” the variants which have floated around among the Times’ witty scriveners. If Kerry actually made this statement, no one ever told them at Nexis. But my dear Mr. Bennet! A month before Dowd’s column appeared, Kerry did make a NASCAR remark. On February 15, Bush had traveled to Daytona, where he pretended to enjoy the big race. The next day, Kerry sagely rebutted. Tape of Kerry’s statement was played on that day’s Inside Politics:

KERRY (2/16/04): George Bush went down to Daytona yesterday to do a photo opportunity at NASCAR. Now, I happen to like NASCAR, and I'm particularly pleased that Dale Earnhardt Jr. won the race, for a lot of reasons that many of you who follow it will understand.

Let me tell you something, we don't need a president who just says, “Gentlemen start your engines.” We need a president who says “America, let's start our economy and put people back to work.”

“I happen to like NASCAR.” According to the Nexis record, that’s the closest Kerry has come to the comic locution they’ve flogged at the Times. Who knows? Maybe Dowd, Stolberg, Tierney, Egan and Rich have some other moment in mind. (For a partial Times explanation, keep reading.) But given this mangy gang’s track record, we find ourselves driven to doubt.

After all, Dowd and Rich are the fallen creatures who invented the Love Story lunacy—the stupid, bogus tale about Gore that helped decide Campaign 2000. We’ve discussed the role the twin terrors played in the invention of this plupotent myth. And we’ve discussed what Time’s Karen Tumulty said about such dumb-ass colleagues:

TUMULTY (9/5/00): I am the reporter to whom Al Gore claimed that Love Story was based on him and Tipper...I was sort of appalled to see the way it played in the media.

Tumulty knew what Gore had said. And she said she was “sort of appalled” at the way fallen colleagues like Dowd and Rich spun it. “I thought [it] was very unfair,” she said. For a fuller record of Tumulty’s statement, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/5/04.

No, this NASCAR moment hasn’t changed the outcome of the current race. But did Kerry really voice the pleasing statement the Times keeps quoting and re-quoting? The Times has run the quote five times; each time, a clever scribe has put the wood to the silly solon for his utterly comical comment. But did Kerry actually utter this statement? Or have Times quote-improvers been up to old tricks, again showing their dread liberal bias?

WHY WE ASK: We raise this topic because Atrios mentioned it yesterday, linking to a site which once asked us about it. (We had never pursued the topic ourselves.) In a follow-up post, Atrios notes that Arthur Bovino (Times public editor’s office) has explained the origin of the troubling quotation. According to Bovino, “Dowd got the quote from someone who had been at a Kerry rally and confirmed it with a reporter who had been there. The quote later appeared in The Times in a political points column. The reporter was not quoting Ms. Dowd but working from her own notes.”

Obviously, that reporter is Stolberg. (We quote her “political points” piece above.) And guess what? Stolberg was traveling with Kerry on February 16, the day he made his NASCAR remark! She didn’t mention the remark in her next-day story. But other scribes did quote the un-funny comment, the one which was played on Inside Politics.

No, none of this makes a bit of difference, except as a portrait of high press corps culture. But on what day did Lockjaw Kerry make the comment that called out for ridicule? As Atrios notes, isn’t it strange that no one else ever mentioned the silly remark—that there is no record of the comment, except the record the Times has established? Given the way Kerry’s persona has been spun, wouldn’t a pleasing remark like this have received a wider airing?

So when did Kerry make this remark? When, aside from February 16, did Kerry ever comment on NASCAR? Cough it up, Bovino! Lay out the facts! Remember what we’re telling Dan Rather—the cover-up is always worse than the crime! Just as a point of curiosity, the Times does need to lay out the facts about this repeated story.

It is all so wearisome.