Spin Times
So eight years ago, Ned Lamont wrote a letter to Joe Lieberman about Clinton’s affair. So what? What does this have to do with anything going on today? This smacks of the Kerry intern rumor or Gore’s “earth-toned” outfits controversy: that is to say, stuff that the neoconservatives just dream up and hurl around in case anything should happen to stick. (Though, to be sure, both of those earlier inanities were major league stuff and this is maybe double-A fiasco at best).
Unfortunately, in this case (as in others), the New York Times is helping hurl. Because the letter Lamont wrote was a fairly serious smackdown. And the letter the Times describes is all kiss up. Check out the side-by-side comparison that Atrios has posted.
To confabulate the sensibility of the article, the Times had to take apart the text of Lamont’s letter and rebuild it like an M.C. Escher drawing. True, the text they use is all there, but nothing connects to where it came from, and the blunt message of Lamont’s original is transformed into a (completely false) between-the-lines endorsement of something Joe did almost a decade ago.
So who’s buying this journalistic origami? And among those few buyers, who’s vote is going to change? It’s a genuinely creepy ploy, digging out a letter, lying about what it said, and then regretfully tarring your opponent as an unreliable flip-flopper. (As if Joe’s not flopping on Iraq right now.) I suppose campaigns do this sort of thing because they’ve been getting away with it so long, they don’t even really think about it. Sadder still: the Lieberman campaign doesn’t have anything better to talk about than an eight-year-old letter. And even then, they can’t tell the truth.
But why would the Times a) have dog in this fight (surely Lamont would sell more papers), and b) be willing to pull a crazy stunt on their dog’s behalf? What does the Times gain — really, at the end of the day — by contorting facts like this? And doesn’t it just chip away, chip away, chip away at their credibility?
