The Unknown Candidate: Ours is But to Spin or Die?

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Ours is But to Spin or Die?

One problem with today's David Brooks New York Times piece (see below): in characterizing the Cheney-Whittington accident as merely "a sad but unremarkable event," he is demonstrating his own journalistic failings.

Reporters are supposed to investigate and report the facts. The spin society, spun to a science by the current Rovian White House Rogues, can only be held accountable when journalists do their jobs: namely, cut through the spin and get to the facts.

We expect politicians to spin. We expect activists to be biased. We expect bloggers to jump on conspiracy bandwagons.

We count on journalists to find the truth.

Rather than dismissing it, why is Brooks not journalistically curious about that beer that Double-DWI-Convicted-Cheney admitted to drinking before he accidentally shot Whittington? How much did Whittington drink? Is it conceivable that the reason Cheney avoided the press was because of that beer? Maybe he had more than one beer? Was he drunk? Why was the mention of the beer cut out of the interview that aired on Fox news? Were the police called immediately? Was Cheney asked to take a breathalyzer? What did the other witnesses to accident say? Were they even contacted by the press? By the police? What's the true story?

The issue, for Brooks, is why he chose to write a cliched piece about the way journalists, bloggers and politicians rely on cliches -- dismissing the Cheney-Whittington story in the process.

Mr. Brooks fails to hold himself--as a professional journalist--accountable for his own failure to dig out the truth from the truthiness.

As Edith Ann says, "And that's the truthhhhh."

Places, Everyone. Action!
By David Brooks
The New York Times

One of the most impressive things about us in Washington, you must admit, is our ability to unfailingly play our assigned roles. History throws unusual circumstances before our gaze, but no matter how strange they may at first appear, we are always able to squeeze them into one of our preapproved boxes so we may utter our usual clichés.

The Battle of Corpus Christi is but the latest example of our capacity to transform fact into stereotype.

On a personal level, the Cheney-Whittington accident was a sad but unremarkable event. Two men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious. The shooter is anguished in his guilt.

"The image of him falling is something I will never be able to get out of my mind," Dick Cheney told Brit Hume yesterday, adding, "It was ... one of the worst days of my life."

Afterward, he looked back, relived the moment and took responsibility. "It was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else," Cheney said. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun.

But we in Washington are able to rise above the normal human reaction. We have our jobs. We have our roles.

So in the days following the Cheney-Whittington accident, liberal pundits had to live up to their responsibility to manufacture a series of unsubstantiated allegations while turning the episode into a Clifford Odets-style tale of plutocrats gone wild. "Was he drunk? I mean, these are ultrarich Republicans, at a weekend, fun-time hunting," the pundit Lawrence O'Donnell wondered on MSNBC.

Meanwhile over at the blogosphere, the keyboard jockeys had a responsibility to sniff up vast conspiracies and get lost in creepy minutiae. "The 50,000 acre Armstrong Ranch is in Kenedy County. So I figure the Armstrongs probably have a lot of pull in county government. So, just a question: how thorough was the investigation of what happened?" the influential blogger Josh Marshall queried darkly. Earlier, he veered off, as he must, into picayune and skin-crawling theorizing about the path the pellets took through Whittington's body:

"Would the weapon and ammunition Dick Cheney shot have the force to imbed pellets near Whittington's heart at 30 yards? ... These pellets would have to have pierced his clothing, his skin and then lodged inside the body cavity, somewhere near or around his heart. The shot came from the right and the heart is on the left so that might add to the amount of tissue needing to be traversed."

Meanwhile we in the regular media have our own stereotypes to guide us. We are assigned by the Fates to turn every bad thing into Watergate, to fill the air with dark lamentations about cover-ups and appearances of impropriety and the arrogance of power. We have to follow the money. (So was born the stories of the potentially missing $7 hunting license.) We are impelled to elevate horse race over substance and write tales in which the quality of the message management takes precedence over the importance or unimportance of what's being said.

Then, rushing to the footlights, come the politicians, with their alchemist's ability to turn reality into spin. It would have been natural, and probably smart, for some politician to put politics aside and say simply that Cheney and his friend were to be sympathized with at this moment. But life is a campaign, and they are merely players.

"The refusal of this administration to level with the American people in matters large and small is very disturbing," Hillary Clinton declared. Nancy Pelosi added, "Open government would demand that the vice president come clean on what happened there."

Finally there is the Office of the Vice President, inevitably failing to surpass expectations. The vice president's role, on this as on all days, is to treat the press and the Washington community in general as a plague-ridden horde, from whom it is possible, upon the merest conversation or contact, to catch some soul-destroying disease. So, of course, the vice president was compelled to recreate his role as Voldemort, Keeper of the Secrets.

We have, when you put it all together, created a political climate impeccably sterilized of spontaneity and normal human response. We have our roles, dear audience. Ours is not to feel and think. Ours is but to spin or die.

Photo credit: David Brooks (New York Times)