Pubdate: Mon, 08 May 2006 Source: Washington Post (DC) Copyright: 2006 The Washington Post Company Contact: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491 Author: Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writer KENNEDY'S SMOOTH RIDE TURNS BUMPY It's hard to imagine that Patrick Kennedy would have gotten elected to Congress a dozen years ago without his last name. It's equally hard to imagine that the media would be going wild about his late-night car crash and prescription drug addiction if he weren't a Kennedy. The only lingering mystery is why national news organizations didn't pounce earlier on the Rhode Island Democrat's long history of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and a series of downright embarrassing incidents. The answer in large measure is that Kennedy hasn't been a very important House member. But given the journalistic obsession with the Kennedy family and its tragicomic soap opera, he does seem to have gotten an easy ride -- except in the New England press, which has chronicled his every misstep. While Kennedy, the 38-year-old son of Ted Kennedy, was widely reported to have held a news conference Friday, it was nothing of the sort. He read a statement designed to elicit sympathy, saying he was going into rehab, and took no questions. This amounted to an age-old damage-control technique: changing the subject. Kennedy refused to respond to questions about his crashing into a Capitol police barrier at 2:45 a.m. Thursday and whether he had been drinking -- as one Hill bartender told the Boston Herald -- or, as he has maintained, was in a stupor caused by Ambien and another prescription drug. The story gained the whiff of a cover-up when a Capitol Police supervisor blocked any sobriety test. When national news organizations last week began throwing together their congressman-in-trouble profiles -- along with the inevitable Ambien sidebars -- there was a long list of local clips to pore over. In 1991, while a state representative, Kennedy acknowledged -- following a National Enquirer story -- having used cocaine as a teenager, but said he had kicked the habit years earlier by checking into a treatment center. In 2000 alone, Kennedy got into a scuffle with an airport security guard, who said he shoved her during an argument about oversize luggage; admitted taking antidepressants; was accused by a charter company of causing $28,000 in damage to a rented sailboat; and, after a few drinks and an argument, had a distraught date call the Coast Guard to be rescued from his chartered yacht. Just last month, Kennedy hit another car in a Rhode Island parking lot. Relatively little of this drew significant national coverage. Among the brief mentions in the New York Times, a 2002 piece on Kennedy's reelection campaign included a paragraph on his personal problems, quoting the congressman as saying: "If you are a Kennedy, people always make more of such things than really exists, and the true Kennedy haters just won't let go of it." More typical were earlier Times pieces headlined "Wielding the Kennedy Name for the Good of His Party" and "Kennedy With Oomph (and Moneybags) Is Patrick." A 2000 Los Angeles Times piece on Kennedy's money-raising prowess said he can be a "hothead" who "almost came to blows" with a Republican lawmaker. The Washington Post covered a couple of the incidents as gossip items and ran such short news stories as "Rep. Kennedy Hopes to Quit House Fundraising Post." Kennedy has gotten rougher treatment in his home region, where Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr last week called him "generally dumber than two rocks." It's difficult not to feel sympathy for Kennedy, who grew up in a relentlessly scrutinized family in which two of his uncles were murdered. But soft-focus media coverage has given him plenty of chances, far more than would be accorded a run-of-the-mill congressman with his history of self-inflicted wounds. Thanks to his Capitol fender-bender, however, that is likely to change. Are stumbling presidents just plain funny? Does sinking in the polls produce a rising tide of ridicule? Do millionaire comedians like kickin' 'em when they're down? You bet. The number of late-night jokes about George W. Bush has more than doubled this year -- with almost a third of them mocking his intelligence, followed by his declining popularity, his personality, the Dubai ports deal and the war in Iraq. Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O'Brien averaged 45 Bush jokes a month last year, says the Center for Media and Public Affairs. But for the first three months of this year, they have popped the president 102 times a month. Leno: "The president does not like change in personnel. He likes to keep the same people. I think he got this from having the same third-grade teacher year after year." Letterman: "According to a recent poll, three out of five Americans believe George W. Bush should be impeached. And when he heard that, the president said, 'Cool, I love peaches.' " O'Brien: "In a speech yesterday -- this is true -- President Bush told the Iraqi people to, this is a quote, 'Get governing.' Then, the president introduced his new speechwriter, Larry the Cable Guy." The ridicule factor is a pretty decent political barometer. In 1998, the number of late-night jokes about Bill Clinton more than doubled -- to more than 140 a month -- as the Lewinsky affair launched endless punch lines about the president as horndog. In Bush's case, his rocky performance has revived the old stereotype of W. as dim bulb, or perhaps made it safer to skewer the president than, say, in the sober aftermath of 9/11. The importance of humor was underscored in heavy-breathing fashion after Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Some C-SPAN viewers liked his routine, and others -- including most of the media gang in attendance -- did not. Many liberal bloggers were quick to denounce the mainstream media for not showering the Comedy Central host with publicity and praise. The reason, said these bloggers, was that Colbert had skewered Bush in a way that embarrassed the timid White House press corps. "Colbert's was a brave and shocking performance," writes Chris Durang in the Huffington Post. "And for the media to pretend it isn't newsworthy is . . . a symbol of how shoddy and suspect the media is." Salon Editor Joan Walsh says "Colbert's deadly performance . . . exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion" with the administration. Really? Or are left-wingers just so mad at the media for not denouncing Bush daily that they prefer the zingers of a fake anchor? Colbert did take some swipes at the president in the guise of the blowhard pundit he plays on TV. ("You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.") But it was hardly the stinging denunciation being cheered on by his liberal fans. In fact, Colbert was just as dismissive in what he described as his "contempt" for the black-tie crowd of Washington journalists. ("Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.") Humor often cuts in a way that journalism doesn't, which is why Bush's late-night drubbing is serious business. Bush's detractors are convinced that Colbert drew blood, and maybe journalists were unenthusiastic because they got scratched in the process. But the jokes wouldn't resonate if much of the country wasn't already unhappy with the president. The stock market dropped last Monday, thanks to Maria Bartiromo. The CNBC anchor reported that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke believed that his recent congressional testimony had been misinterpreted and that his agency might not be done raising interest rates after all, depending on future economic developments. And how did Bartiromo know this? Bernanke told her at the White House Correspondents' dinner. "What am I going to do, walk away?" Bartiromo said the next day on CNBC. Bernanke "never said it was off the record," network spokesman Kevin Goldman says. "She didn't agree to any conditions." Still, the Fed chief will probably curtail his dinner-party chatter. Another journalist has blogged her way into oblivion. Gina Vivinetto, music critic for the free tabloid published by the St. Petersburg Times, resigned after acknowledging that she had created a fake personal page on MySpace.com. Times Executive Editor Neil Brown told the Tampa Tribune that Vivinetto used the bogus page to post mocking comments of "a somewhat sexual nature" about a county commissioner. By the way, I've gotten a ton of e-mail about my piece on New Orleans yesterday and the media coverage of what remains a devastated area. My thanks to everyone who took the trouble to write. The Boston Globe has a damage assessment on Kennedy's problems: "Kennedy's return to rehab after a car accident under shadowy circumstances seemed to some political analysts to be a benchmark -- the moment even some supporters wondered whether he would ever fully outrun his demons." Still, "analysts say Rhode Islanders are likely to reelect Kennedy, who has won the loyalty of constituents by bringing federal dollars home to the nation's smallest state." The Chicago Tribune sees the GOP on the defensive: "Six months before Election Day, with control of Congress potentially teetering in the balance, Republicans across the country are beset by anxieties about the fortunes of their party and fearful that their dominance could be upended by an electorate hungry for a change. "The alarms, which have been sounding for months, are increasing in volume as the summer nears with feelings of discontent over the price of gasoline, the war in Iraq and illegal immigration. Though Democrats have yet to settle on solutions to those issues or a unified message for the fall, Republicans worry that many voters simply will be looking for a fresh start." The New York Daily News really overreaches in this CIA piece: "CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly resigned yesterday amid allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman." May have attended? The same story acknowledges: "Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties." Dick Polman does a little reality check on Rummy: "The Orwellian master is still Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld. On Thursday, he was ambushed in Atlanta by questioner Ray McGovern, who happened to be a retired CIA official who provided President Reagan with daily intelligence briefings. McGovern rebuked Rumsfeld for falsely claiming, during the early weeks of the war, that weapons of mass destruction had been located. "McGovern: 'You said you knew where they were.' "Rumsfeld: 'I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were.' "Memo to the Records Department: Call up all previous Rumsfeld statements and insert the words 'suspect sites.' Too late. We already have the transcript of Rumsfeld on ABC. March 30, 2003. "Question to Rumsfeld: 'Is it curious to you that (troops) haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?' Rumsfeld: 'We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat.' "Another technique in '1984' was to simply dump inconvenient facts down the 'memory hole.' Rumsfeld has tried that numerous times already. One of my favorites: On Feb. 20, 2003, during the runup to war, he told PBS that the Americans 'would be welcomed,' a scene akin to Afghanistan, where people were 'playing music, cheering, flying kites.' Seven months later, when a broadcast journalist read the PBS remarks back to Rumsfeld, the Defense secretary replied: 'Never said that. Never did...You're thinking of somebody else.' "Could these myriad attempts to rewrite history have anything to do with the latest poll findings, which show that even 45 percent of self-identified conservatives are now voicing disapproval of the president?" But Gateway Pundit does his own fact-checking on the Atlanta incident: "Ray McGovern, the man who heckled Rummy on Thursday, has a trail of lunatic behavior a mile long . . . But, to the mainstream media, he's just your average 'retired CIA analyst!'... "In June of 2005, Ray McGovern blamed Zionists for starting the War in Iraq: "The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration 'neocons' so 'the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.' He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. 'Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,' McGovern said. 'The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.'" Those quotes, by the way, are from a WashPost piece last year, so not everyone is treating McGovern as your average ex-analyst. "Thank God that 'Jews feel Democrats fundamentally believe it is important to make sure that American Jews feel comfortable being American Jews,' or, that accusation by Ray McGovern would sound horribly anti-Semitic." The New Republic's Ryan Lizza has been reporting how one likely presidential candidate has been wrapping himself in the flag--but what many people will consider the wrong flag: "It's hard to make out, because the video is fuzzy. The copy I obtained was originally recorded off a television using VHS in 1993 and then transferred to a second tape, further degrading the quality. But, once you know what it is, it makes sense. It sits folded on a bookcase of trophies and bric-a-brac behind George Allen, who is seated at a desk in his home office. It's right there next to the fax machine. You can see the red field. You can make out the diagonal blue bar. And you can see what looks like a white star. It is the Confederate flag, and it appears in the very first ad that Allen broadcast in 1993, when he ran for governor . . . "Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where's Waldo, with the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character. First, as The New Republic reported last week, there's the senior class photo from Palos Verdes High School with Allen wearing a Confederate flag pin. Now we learn that the Confederate flag appears as a decoration in Allen's first statewide ad, even though he has long maintained that the flag did not adorn his home after 1992. "Some conservatives have recently argued that the revelations about Allen's high school photo are irrelevant because the picture is so old. '[I]f we're going to scrutinize people's high school records as we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run,' columnist Kathleen Parker wrote last week. But, as revealed by the 1993 campaign ad--as well as the accounts of Allen associates now stepping forward--his embrace of the Confederate flag is even more extensive than tnr previously reported. According to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the flag--on himself, his car, inside his home--or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000." Of course, that could be a plus in the South.