When Kornbluh and Robert Parry first revealed the activities of the OPD in Foreign Policy magazine in 1988, Reich, according to a Boston Globe report, compared the fully accurate article to Hitler's "big lie" technique regarding the Final Solution. It's hard to imagine a more offensive manipulation of the murder of millions than using it to slander journalists and lie to the country about an illegal war--but hell, the Bush people are just getting started.
©2001 ERIC ALTERMAN

California Reamin’

Special report: George Bush's America
By Greg Palast

You nasty-minded readers probably believe George Bush's energy plan is just some pea-brained scheme to pay off the president's oil company buddies, fry the planet, and smother Mother Earth in coal ash, petroleum pollutants and nuclear waste.

If that's what you think, you've overlooked the vicious intent of the whole programme. It's payback time - and Bush intends to make California pay.

Let me list California's sins. First, California voted Gore. Second, California's governor, Gray Davis, is an intelligent, popular Democrat who could whup little George's butt in the next election. Three, California voted Gore.

Keep in mind that the entire excuse for this polluters' wet dream of an 'energy plan' is that there is an energy 'crisis' in California. We are told that there is just not enough electricity and gas.

Even the Democrats and the New York Times agree that there is an energy crisis in California, which is evidence enough to conclude: There is no energy crisis in California.

In case you need more evidence, check this out. In December, the lights went out in southern California, the price of electricity jumped 1000% over the previous year and the price of natural gas jumped 1000% in one week.

Power shortage? Nope. The California power grid operator reported that, just over the California border at the 'Henry Hub' gas pipeline switching centre, you could buy plentiful gas for $1 (£66p) a therm. A couple of miles down the road in California, the price was $10.

By golly, it turns out the two power merchants that controlled the biggest pipe into California simply blocked part of the tube. Result: panic, price spikes and black outs.

Market speculators made half a billion dollars on that cute little manoeuvre. In all, says last week's report by Dr Anjali Shiffren of the grid system, "monopoly rents," "economic withholding" and "physical withholding" were responsible for artificial shortages and excess charges of $6.2 billion last year - half the state's light bill.

In other words, California did not run out of energy, it ran out of supplies of government. Until two years ago, California regulated electric companies. Then Mr Davis' predecessor, a Republican governor, 'de-regulated' energy, and the state became a pricing predators' picnic.

Governor Davis' own plan to end this faux crisis is a combination of re-regulating electricity prices and de-privatising part of the power system. In other words, Davis's cure is one part realism, one part populism and one part so-she-lizm.

Texas Power trading corporations (TXU), Reliant and Enron (Bush's numero uno campaign donor), would bleed profits under the Davis plan.

Now that's a crisis. So, the vice-president, Dick Cheney, the man we Americans pay to think for Dubya, drafted a plan to deal with the Davis crisis. Until January, Mr Cheney was CEO of Halliburton Corporation, the USA's largest oil-drilling services company and builder of nuclear plants.

Mr Cheney wants us to drill more oil and build more nukes. This won't do squat for California, which does not have oil-fired power plants and cannot put more reactors on earthquake faults.

But then, if I may remind you first, California voted Gore.
©2001 Greg Palast,

Quotable Quote

"Truth, like oil, will in time rise to surface"
"Must turn up many stones to find hiding place of snake."
"Optimist look at doughnut, pessimist look at hole." ... Charlie Chan

Salon published investigations in 1998 that first raised questions about the Arkansas Project and its dealings with David Hale, the controversial main witness in the Whitewater investigation against the Clintons. The relationship between Hale and the Spectator was ultimately the subject of a federal investigation. Olson's relationship with Hale, whom he represented when Hale fought a federal subpoena, was also a subject of the federal probe. The articles in Salon, as well as "The Hunting of the President," a book by Salon columnist Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, were frequently used in documents that Leahy presented to bolster his case against the Olson bid.
©2001 Alicia Montgomery and Daryl Lindsey

Corporate polluters, health care opponents, and illusion-makers, probably don't understand that they are contributing to the destruction of (almost) everything that makes life beautiful, sweet and pure. However, it is up to ordinary Americans with clear vision to toss a little light on the subject. In our proposed working definition of "good," working to preserve the beautiful, sweet and pure things in life has to figure in somewhere. It is a better way to spend a life than screwing the poor, plundering the earth and grubbing for corporate profit.
©2001 Carla Binion

At Skull And Bones, Bush's Secret Club Initiates Ream Gore
by Ron Rosenbaum

It’s the primal scene of American power, of Bush family values. For two centuries, the initiation rite of Skull and Bones has shaped the character of the men who have shaped the American character, including two Presidents named Bush.

And last Saturday, April 14–for the first time ever–that long-secret rite was witnessed by a team of outsiders, including this writer.

Using high-tech night-vision video equipment able to peer through the gloom into the inner courtyard of the Skull and Bones "Tomb" in New Haven, The Observer team witnessed:

o The George W. effect: intoxicated by renewed proximity to Presidential power, a robed Bonesman posing as George W. harangued initiates in an eerily accurate Texas drawl: "I’m gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore" and "I’m gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore."

o Privileged Skull and Bones members mocked the assault on Abner Louima by crying out repeatedly, "Take that plunger out of my ass!"

o Skull and Bones members hurled obscene sexual insults ("lick my bumhole") at initiates as they were forced to kneel and kiss a skull at the feet of the initiators.

o Other members acted out the tableau of a throat-cutting ritual murder.

It’s important to remember this is not some fraternity initiation. It is an initiation far more secret–and far more significant, in terms of real power in the United States–than that of the Cosa Nostra. If the Bushes are "the WASP Corleones"–as the ever more stingingly waspish Maureen Dowd has suggested–this is how their "made men" (and women) are made.* It’s an initiation ceremony that has bonded diplomats, media moguls, bankers and spies into a lifelong, multi-generational fellowship far more influential than any fraternity. It was–and still remains–the heart of the heart of the American establishment.

Further revelations turned up by the Observer Bones Investigation Unit include:

o The words to the secret Skull and Bones "death mantra."

o Copies of the Skull and Bones tax returns, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, raise questions about the legitimacy of the secret society’s claim to charitable tax-exempt deduction status–particularly relevant considering recent criticism of the Bush tax plan for favoring the privileged few.

o A possible explanation emerged in the course of the initiation ceremony for George W.’s decision to run for President in the first place.

‘The Devil Equals Death’

The Observer Mission Impossible expedition had its inception several months ago with a phone call from Peggy Adler, the research associate on my previous Skull and Bones piece in The Observer (July 17, 2000). She is the demon investigator and former Iran-contra committee staffer who, among other coups, cross-referenced corporate boards to crack the "RTA code," the corporate shell game by which the corporate shell of the Skull and Bones society, the Russell Trust Association, shielded its paper trail from prying eyes by changing its name to RTA Inc.

Ms. Adler said she had been approached by a member of the Yale community who wanted to share with us a remarkable coup of his own: He had found a way last year, in April of 2000, to audiotape the Skull and Bones initiation ceremony. And he wanted to know if we’d be interested in an attempt to videotape it this time.

And so one afternoon last December, shortly after the Bush electoral victory had been certified, I met with the intrepid fellow; he booted up his laptop and let me listen to the sounds of a ceremony that had been the subject of fevered speculation for nearly two centuries now.

Of course, there is more to Skull and Bones than the mystical mumbo-jumbo of its rituals. The rituals are less important than the relationships–the bonds of power and influence that develop between Skull and Bones initiates after they graduate. But the relationships are first forged by the rituals and fact that the founders of Time Inc. and the C.I.A., as well as several Secretaries of State and National Security Advisors–the men who made the decision to drop the Hiroshima bomb, invade the Bay of Pigs and plunge us into Vietnam, the Tafts, the Bundys, the Buckleys, the Harrimans, the Lovetts–all took part in this initiation ritual may have something to do with the real world power of those bonds. The unspoken understanding, the comfort level with the clandestine, the nods and winks with which power is exercised.

The initiation ceremony begins the process of inculcating into the elect of the elite (just 15 out of 1,300 in every Yale class) the same mystical sense of mission that allowed the British Old Boy network to rule a worldwide empire.

The whole phenomenon is rarely looked into beyond the exotic ritual trappings (although Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson talk about the world-wide web of Bones foreign policy mandarins in The Wise Men). But it’s something I’ve been investigating off and on for a quarter of a century now. I am the Ahab of Skull and Bones, pursuing the white whale (or white male) leviathan to the utmost depths. As an undergraduate at Yale I lived next door to the Skull and Bones Tomb, and back in 1977 I published the first outsider’s investigation into Skull and Bones, its rituals and its influence on American political culture (an updated version of that piece, revised to include my chilly exchange with George and Barbara Bush on Air Force Two, can be found in my recent nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune).

And so it was momentous for me to actually hear the sounds of the Skull and Bones initiation on that laptop. But in listening to it, awe gave way to a mixture of puzzlement and embarrassment–and an even deeper, unsatisfied curiosity.

In part it was the fact that the ritual was heard but not seen. My Yale source had found a previously unexploited perch from which to record the sounds of the ceremonies, but could glimpse them only incompletely. He reported a figure dressed like the devil, another one in a hooded-skeleton costume and others in robes. The thing that stood out for me, listening to it, was what I’ve come to think of as "the death mantra."

Yes, the death mantra–here it is, the three-line Skull and Bones initiation-ritual theme that has bound three Presidents (including the present one) to their secret society:

‘THE HANGMAN EQUALS DEATH!
THE DEVIL EQUALS DEATH!
DEATH EQUALS DEATH!’

Most of the speculative lore about the Skull and Bones ritual has centered on its death fixation. Beyond the obvious skull-and-crossbones insignia, of course, the most persistent story is that initiates spend their senior year in the basement crypt of the Bones Tomb taking turns lying in a coffin and, in two long, intense, psycho-drama autobiographical sessions in said coffins, recount their personal and sexual history to the other 14 chosen ones. The better to bond for life with those they know best and prepare for their destiny as stewards of the ruling class.

The death-centered imagery, the injunction to initiates that they must "die to the barbarian world" and be reborn in the Elysian company of the elect of "The Order," as they call it, is what makes Skull and Bones as radically different from a college fraternity as the Gambino family is from the "hunting and fishing club" that was their nominal headquarters.

The hangman equals death. The devil equals death. Death equals death ….

What the hell is going on there? Is it a puzzle in logic, like "All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal …"? Does it solve out to "The hangman equals the devil?"

Could one detect a capital-punishment theme here–the hangman as executioner presaging George W.’s prolific execution rate as Texas governor? "George W. equals death," you might say.

And what about the devil? (Well, the figure dressed like the devil.) Is that the secret they’ve been covering up ever since the society was founded in 1832, the offshoot of a German secret society: devil worship? A fulfillment of the paranoid fantasies of the fundamentalist right, who believe the Eastern establishment is a front for Satanic conspiracy.

Probably not, but it made me more eager to participate in this year’s caper: the attempt to see as well as hear it, to capture it all on video–for educational, historical and journalistic purposes to document a defining rite of passage of the American ruling class.

Oh, yes–before we get to the night-vision videotape, there was one more thing, the embarrassing part of the audiotape, the OOGA-BOOGA part. Part of the ceremony on the tape involved an initiation master ordering the neophytes to fetch bones and uttering the (I guess) fake Tarzan-movie "native" chant "OOGA BOOGA." It left me feeling embarrassed for Skull and Bones. Hard to ever take seriously again anyone whose defining life-mission moment includes an OOGA BOOGA.

But as it turned out, "OOGA BOOGA" was not evident in this year’s ceremony, as far as we were able to tell. Perhaps it was an improvisation, like this year’s impersonation of George W. ("I’ll ream you like I reamed Al Gore") was.

The Observer Mission Impossible Force met to plot strategy an hour before sunset on initiation night, Saturday, April 12. It is not widely known, but Tap Night, which occurs on Thursday, is not generally the same as initiation night. The good stuff happens on Saturday night, and already limos are cruising the quiet streets that crisscross the Yale campus, conveying initiates of other secret societies to their rituals. Bones initiates come on foot, knock on the massive triple-locked wooden door of the Tomb and are conveyed to the first stage of the ritual. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Let me just mention how much I admired the intrepid Yale members of the Observer Bones Task Force for displaying the kind of curiosity, initiative and heretical, skeptical impulse apparently absent on most Ivy campuses, if you believe David Brooks’ recent Atlantic Monthly cover story on get-along-go-along premature careerists. The guys on my team will make more of a real contribution than any of the smug secret-society types.

First on the agenda was a quick examination of the Bones income-tax filings, which an outside consultant to the team had obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. He and Peggy Adler pointed out to me a couple of dubious assertions on the Form 990’s (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax), which called into question certain of the grounds for charitable exemption. In particular, there was the assertion in the 1997 RTA Incorporated filing (Part VI, line 80b) that the organization was not "related … through common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers etc. to any other exempt or non-exempt organization."

Contradicting that assertion is information on the filing of the Deer Island Club Corporation. Deer Island is the private island of the Skull and Bones Society, located in the St. Lawrence River. It is the place where Bones members bring their families for summer get-togethers. It is wholly owned and run by Skull and Bones members, apparently contradicting Bones’ claim of "no relationship" to another exempt organization, and appearing to contradict the strictly educational and charitable mission for which RTA gets its exemption for Skull and Bones.

The consultant argues in a memo that the purpose of the 80b question on the Bones deduction claim form "is to prevent tax exempt charities from undertaking non-charitable activities by hiding them in another corporation. This is of course precisely what RTA Inc. is accomplishing through the Deer Island Club Corporation. In order to conceal this arrangement however RTA Inc. denies its connection to the DICC."

In fact, he goes on, "RTA and the DICC are so closely linked that for all intents and purposes RTA Inc. does own Deer Island despite its claims to the contrary."

I’m not going to go into the whole tax issue here. Perhaps the Bones shell corporation has a good and valid reason for claiming that it has no connection to the Bones private-island country club.** Perhaps this sort of thing goes on all the time among the private charities of the privileged. I don’t think Deer Island will become George W. Bush’s Whitewater. But one might think that a scrupulous White House counsel would want to look at the kind of tax information George W.’s secret society is filing on his behalf. Particularly since he’s promising enormous windfalls for the privileged, the tax breaks his secret society takes should be utterly beyond suspicion. Does the President, I’d like to know, claim his Skull and Bones dues as a charitable deduction, when the only charity seems to be providing a club house and country house for the privileged? The RTA filing claims Skull and Bones exists "for the benefit of Yale University." But Yale–which celebrates three centuries of luminous atainments this weekend–ought to question what "benefit" it gets from chants of "lick my bumhole" and the mockery of Abner Louima.

Anyway, as night came falling and we choreographed the evening’s caper, I felt that we were carrying on an old-fashioned, longstanding tradition: the natural reaction of the democratic (small D) tradition to elitist power that conceals itself within the cloak of privilege and secrecy. And for me, it was a culmination of my own quarter-century quest, one that had become personalized lately by the fact that our Skull and Bones President had been a classmate of mine at Yale.

‘Run, Neophyte, Run!’

At last, zero hour approached. For two centuries, the outside world had wondered and fantasized about what was about to happen, what actually went on in the fabled Skull and Bones initiation. There’s a long tradition of Yale secret societies (including Bones) raiding other secret societies to capture their ritual artifacts. In the 1970’s, an all-woman break-in team published photographs of the Bone’s Tomb’s interior. But tonight, for the first time ever, we would attempt to capture the actual secret initiation ritual and bring it to light for anthropological study. Our team’s equipment included three night-vision-capable digital-video cameras, one tape recorder, a stepladder and two walkie-talkies. (I could never get mine to work.) Because of a recent injury which limits my mobility, I was stationed at a listening post with my tape recorder while the video-cam team proceeded to their more perilous perch at the forward base (as those of us in special ops call it). We planned to rendezvous afterward for me to view the tape.

We split up just as the whoops and groans, the screams and moans began to emanate from inside the Tomb and the masters of the Skull and Bones initiation began establishing the posts they’d man for the occult psycho-drama to come.

From my post, I could see through an open window shadowy figures walking very close above my head. Later I’ll put my audio impressions together with the video-cam record the other team obtained for a more complete picture, but first let me transcribe some of the notes I made from listening in. Fragmentary as they are, they capture some of the strangeness, and perhaps the kind of disorientation the initiates themselves experienced there in the courtyard of Skull and Bones.

First, there was the guy posing as George W. He seemed to be a bit disgruntled at being given this role–a feeling he expressed by calling out in his George W. drawl to another "Patriarch" (as they’re called): "I got the power to bomb the crap out of China and they give me this station." Then someone–one of the initiates?–called out "Uncle Toby!" (Many Bone ritual personae are taken from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy– you gotta give them credit there for good taste.)

"Uncle Toby!" the cry repeated.

"Shut up, neophyte."

"Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby."

Presumably, this mocking Louima reference was a ploy to scare initiates into thinking Uncle Toby was going to give them the plunger treatment.

That cheerful rectal theme was followed up by:

"I’m gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore!" from the George W. imitator.

Followed by "Help me! It’s the devil!"

And then "George W." really getting into it: "I’m gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore."

Silence. Then a door opened. Voices–half of them, it seemed, women–were screaming: "Run! Neophyte! Run, neophyte!"

(The neophytes are, of course, the new initiates.)

From my post, I could only see hooded figures racing about in the darkness above my head, accompanied by cries of:

"Run, neophyte!"

"Find the femur!"

And (again): "Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby!"

Then silence for awhile. The neophyte seemed to have gone back inside the Tomb. After which one of the Patriarchs complained, "We ought to get better blood than this fuckin’ syrup, man."

It was only later that I learned what the blood was for: the whole throat-slitting "barbarian" tableau after the skull-kissing.

But first there was a different kind of kissing being referred to. There were cries of "Lick my bumhole, neophyte!" "Lick my ass, neophyte!" "Do you like my bum, neophyte?" (Despite these heartfelt pleas, we did not witness any of those acts being consummated.)

The bumhole tribute was followed by more cries of "Get the femur!" and at least part of the death mantra I’d heard before: "DEATH EQUALS DEATH."

Following which, "George W." chimed in with "I’m the President of the motha-fuckin’ U.S.A."–apparently just for the sheer pleasure of saying it. (He was sounding more like the real George W. all the time.)

It began to be clear that what was going on outside in the courtyard was the climax of an initiation ceremony that began inside the Tomb. There, it’s reputed, the initiates must first enter into a coffin and "die to the barbarian world," to the world of "savages" (all but the Skull and Bones elect), in order to be reborn as a member of "The Order." Then comes the skull-kissing and the throat-slashing.

Two hours later, after all 15 of the initiates had burst out to be harangued and scared, I approached the rendezvous point with the night-vision camera team. This was the moment of truth: The night-vision team wasn’t sure what their digicams had picked up. With their own eyes they’d gotten evocative glimpses, but the playback on the camera’s swing-out view screens would be the first time, so far as we knew, any outsider had really seen the legendary ritual. A ritual three Presidents, a few Supreme Court justices, maybe a dozen Senators (including 2004 Democratic Presidential contender John Kerry–which would mean a head-to-head, Skull-to-Skull smackdown with George W.), several Secretaries of State, literary and cultural luminaries including John Hersey and William F. Buckley, had all undergone.

The footage was ghostly, it was grainy–but from the angles of the night-vision cams, we were able to piece together a narrative of what happened when the initiates emerged one at a time from the preliminaries inside the Tomb.

First they were led forward by a figure in a devil costume. Not really a sinister, Satanic-looking figure but, as one of the team put it, "More like Satan’s Little Helper."

A shrill, menacing and sometimes blood-curdling chorus of cries and screams and imprecations accompanied the emergence:

"Hurry, neophyte!" "Run, neophyte!"

"Find the femur, neophyte!" Along with the occasional "Lick my bumhole!" "Remove the plunger!"—type outcries.

The devil figure pulled them into a white tent in the courtyard where, we think, they found their femurs and emerged with what looked like a thigh bone, although it was impossible to tell whether it once belonged to a human or not.

When they reemerged from the tent, they were led to the centerpiece of this part of the ritual.

They were forced face-to-face with a shocking tableau: a guy holding what seemed like a butcher knife, wearing a kind of animal-skin "barbarian" look, stood over what seemed to be a woman covered in fake blood and not much else. The neophyte then approached a skull a few feet away from the knife-wielder-and-victim tableau. The neophyte knelt and kissed the skull, at which point the guy with the knife knelt and cut the throat of the prone figure. (Well, pretended to cut the throat.)

I’m not sure what it all means. I’ve yet to decode the mystical significance of this, although I do love to think of former President George Bush kissing the skull. Obviously, it has something to do with subservience. Kiss the skull of power. Bow down to The Order. But what about the "barbarian" cutting the throat of his victim?

Does it mean "One dies to the barbarian world"? Does it mean "Death to the barbarians"? Does it endorse cutthroat tactics? Is that how they enforce silence and secrecy? I plan to continue my relentless study of the hermeneutics of the Bones rituals, myths and symbolism based on these new revelations, and perhaps with the help of a Bones graduate who feels the time has come to lift the veil on the silly (and no longer even secret) symbolism of their society. (Contact me privately c/o The Edgy Alliance, 577 Second Avenue, Box 105, N.Y., N.Y. 10016.)

All that death imagery, though: Maybe it’s meant to be a first ritualistic confrontation with Mortality, the skull as a memento mori designed to instill in the "neophyte" a sense of the gravity of one’s mission in life.

In that regard, consider the direct relevance of at least one aspect of the ritual to George W. That recurrent phrase: "Run, neophyte, run!"

Think about it. When George W. was first considering the fairly serious shift from baseball-team owner (whose major achievement was trading away Sammy Sosa) to governor of Texas, or when he was considering the shift from one-term governor of Texas to President of the United States, what decided him–what made him think he could pull it off, despite years as a semi-permanent neophyte? Could it be that what he heard, echoing in his brain, down the corridors of the years, was the injunction from that long-ago April night when he was a Skull and Bones initiate? When he bent down to kiss the skull and heard, resounding in his ears, the command: "Run, neophyte, run!"
©2001 Ron Rosenbaum

Bush’s Free Ride

From the attack dogs of the Clinton era to the lap dogs of today, the White House press corps sure isn’t what it used to be.
BY DAN KENNEDY

A LONG FEATURE in the business section of this past Sunday’s New York Times tells you everything you need to know about the comfortably cushy flight the media have been providing for our leisurely First Passenger, George W. Bush.

The piece, by Richard Stevenson, is a profile of Bush’s economic team, which is pushing an ultraconservative line of dramatically lower taxes, less government spending, a privatized Social Security system, and fewer regulations.

Stevenson pays lip service to the notion that the president’s "ideological opponents" have accused him of an agenda that is "fiscally irresponsible, a payoff to its corporate patrons and an effort to repackage right-wing policies in a centrist guise." Then Stevenson weighs in with this assessment: "But even some of the administration’s harshest critics say they have been impressed by the discipline and political touch that the president and his team have brought to pursuing their agenda, especially the tax cut."

Hey, the White House may be populated by right-wing kooks who will wreck the economy and destroy the environment in their zeal to serve their wealthy patrons. But you’ve just got to admire how competent they are.

Sorry for the turbulence, Mr. President, but it looks like clear skies ahead. Would you like an extra pillow?

WHEN BILL Clinton took office eight years ago, he was knocked senseless before he could even get his feet under him. There was the maladroit manner in which he advanced and then abandoned his plan to let gay men and lesbians serve openly in the military; his stumbles alienated both homosexuals and homophobes. There was the controversy over his first two nominees for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, both of whom withdrew over nanny-tax problems. There was even the high-priced designer haircut Clinton received on an airport runway, the subject of days’ worth of sneering commentary.

Bush, by contrast, has enjoyed a remarkably untroubled transition. Some of this is his own doing: when his first nominee for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, was found to have a nanny problem of her own, she was cut off at the knees before she could even begin to defend herself. Bush’s lack of visibility, and the capable but colorless way his superannuated Ford-era staff has gone about setting up shop, have given the media little to do and little to report on in the way of chaos and controversy.

But chaos or no chaos, the media are supposed to subject the president to tough scrutiny. Superficially, Bush may be conducting himself in a more admirable manner than Clinton — no blowjobs in the Oval Office, no sexual-harassment suits, no unfathomable home-state financial tangles of dubious legality (after all, there’s no need to flirt with the outer boundaries of the law when you can trade on your father’s name). Still, George W. Bush, who entered office despite having lost the popular vote by a half-million ballots, is moving ahead with the most conservative agenda since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. You’d think the media would ask some tough questions.

Now, four months into the Bush presidency, the media’s transformation from attack dog to lap dog is finally beginning to attract attention. Unfortunately, the most visible example — a piece by political reporter John Harris in the Washington Post on May 6 — attempts to divert blame away from the media and onto Hillary Rodham Clinton’s favorite bogeyman, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. According to Harris, the principal difference between Bush’s early days and Clinton’s is that Clinton, from day one, had to contend with a mobilized corps of conservative activists — interest groups, commentators, and members of Congress — who continually sought to undermine his presidency.

"They succeeded in many ways," Harris wrote. "One of the most important was their ability to take all manner of presidential miscues, misjudgments or controversial decisions and exploit them for maximum effect. Stories like the travel office firings flamed for weeks instead of receding into yesterday’s news. And they colored the prism through which many Americans, not just conservative ideologues, viewed Clinton. It is Bush’s good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist."

Well, now. According to Harris, the reason Bush is getting better press than Clinton is that liberals are not attacking Bush the way the VRWC went after Clinton, and therefore the media have no one from whom to take dictation. As Kenneth Doran, a bankruptcy lawyer and author from Madison, Wisconsin, put it in a letter to Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews.org, Harris "sets out to defend the Washington press corps against the charge of being George W. Bush’s puppy dogs, but the result reads more like a confession." In the webzine Slate, Joshua Micah Marshall recently blasted the Democrats’ ineffectiveness in criticizing Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s sleazy, politically motivated firing of the Senate parliamentarian. In a tip of the computer to John Harris, the piece was titled wanted: a vast left-wing conspiracy.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources last weekend, co-host Bernard Kalb told Harris, "John, when I first read your piece ... I thought it was brilliant. And a moment later I was smitten by a second thought, which essentially is this, and let me overstate it. Didn’t you do a portrait of the media as a stenographer for the right wing?"

Harris’s response: no, no, no.

But oh, yes, yes, yes.

THERE IS, of course, no shortage of Bush criticism in the media. The editorial and op-ed pages of the Times have attacked Bush continuously for his irresponsible tax-cut and anti-environmental positions. Even columnist Maureen Dowd, who loathes policy and is reportedly friendly with Bush’s father, has gotten into the act.

All three political weeklies — the left-liberal Nation, the moderate-liberal New Republic, and even the moderate-conservative Weekly Standard — have been on Bush like a pissed-off loan shark. The webzine Salon has produced a huge quantity of important reporting about Bush’s nominee for solicitor general, Theodore Olson, who barely escaped a perjury rap during his Reaganaut days, who has been accused of lying about his role in the Richard Mellon Scaife–financed "Arkansas Project" (aimed at digging up dirt on Clinton for publication in the right-wing American Spectator), and who helped mastermind Bush’s disingenuous legal case during the Florida recount.

By last week, the Olson affair finally appeared ready to break into the mainstream. And it should. Journalist David Brock, an Arkansas Project alumnus who wrote the "Troopergate" story early in Clinton’s first term, went so far as to charge that Olson had urged the Spectator to "report" that the suicide of Clinton aide Vincent Foster may actually have been a political murder — an ugly bit of paranoia that Olson himself supposedly didn’t even believe.

Nevertheless, Olson is still a long way from becoming a household name the way, say, Lani Guinier was. And that’s because Bush-whacking has not trickled down in any significant way to the media from which average Americans receive most of their information.

The disparity between anti-Bush elite opinion and pro-Bush mainstream opinion was quantified several weeks ago in a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism titled The First 100 Days. Most of the coverage of this report has focused on the bottom-line finding that coverage of Bush was actually more negative than coverage of Clinton during the first three months of their presidencies (28 percent negative for both; 27 percent positive for Clinton, but only 22 percent positive for Bush). But this is actually a complete misinterpretation of the report’s findings.

In fact, the report looked at coverage by the Big Three networks, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. When you remove Newsweek plus the editorial and op-ed pages of the Times and the Post from the mix, coverage of Bush has been 24 percent positive and 18 percent negative — a marked improvement over Clinton’s 23 percent positive and 28 percent negative coverage. And, of course, despite their declining influence, the three commercial networks still do more to shape public perceptions than any other medium.

Add to that the finding that Clinton got about twice as much coverage as Bush, and the reality becomes clear: in contrast to the relentless pounding to which Clinton was subjected, coverage of Bush has been low-key and polite.

NUMEROUS THEORIES have been advanced to explain the media’s somnolence, and all have at least some validity. In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait joins an old theory — that reporters like politics but hate policy — with a new one: that old-fashioned ideas about objectivity, abandoned long ago when covering purely political stories about strategy, polls, and the like, remain the coin of the journalistic realm when it comes to actual proposals, such as the Bush tax plan. Thus, reporters feel obligated to seek out opposing positions and give them equal weight even when they know that one side is telling the truth and the other is lying — as the Bushies surely are when they claim their tax cut will cost "only" $1.6 trillion, and that it won’t harm Social Security when in fact it is a bold raid on the Social Security trust fund.

Chait’s colleague Franklin Foer, in a commentary on TNR’s Web site, blamed the pro-Bush tilt of the media on liberal bias — that is, reporters are so afraid of being accused of bias that they are bending over backward. Certainly that would explain the self-congratulatory tone of Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz’s recent column in which he fairly bragged of all the e-mail the Post has received from liberals complaining about the paper’s alleged newfound conservative bias.

Then, too, there’s the thuggishness of the Bush press operation. The Clintonistas often disdained the media, and were sometimes criticized for failing to suck up to reporters. The Bushies, though, threaten to make life difficult for anyone who isn’t with the program. Take Houston Chronicle reporter Bennett Roth. After Bush urged parents to talk to their kids about the dangers of drinking and drugs, Roth had the good sense to ask White House spokesman Ari Fleischer whether Bush had talked to his daughters — one of whom, after all, had recently been arrested for underage drinking. The Post reported that Fleischer tracked Roth down after the briefing and told him ominously that his question had been "noted in the building."

And, reportedly, that’s not the first time Fleischer has delivered such a message to a wayward correspondent. Do you suppose that could explain why there has been so little criticism of, say, Dick Cheney’s secret meetings with well-heeled oil-industry representatives in drafting his anti-conservation energy policy — and why there was so much criticism of Hillary Clinton for crafting her health-care plan behind closed doors?

But though there’s something to all these particulars, at root the most important difference is cultural. Clinton’s enemies hated him — really hated him — in a way that Bush’s enemies do not. This hatred extended from Whitewater to Lewinsky and even, on Clinton’s way out the door, to the phony White House vandalism story, whose dismissal last week by the General Accounting Office was barely reported by the media. This irrational hatred was even on display during the recent China crisis, when Senator John Kyl, an Arizona Republican, affably admitted to National Public Radio that if Clinton had acted as obsequiously as Bush, he would have gone ballistic.

"I have more confidence in the Bush administration than I did the Clinton administration when it comes to the conduct of foreign affairs," Kyl said. "So I am naturally much more willing to assume that they are making good decisions than I was after we began to see what the Clinton administration did."

Marbled into all this is the element of generational betrayal. Clinton was the first baby-boomer president, and his attitudes — like those of many of the reporters who covered him — were shaped by the ethos of the 1960s. Some of those reporters, like Sidney Blumenthal, went to work for him. Others, like Joe Klein, saw their initial infatuation turn to repulsion as they learned more about his personal flaws and excesses. An early Newsweek essay by Klein, in which he referred to Clinton’s massively disorganized, omnibus approach to governing as "promiscuity," helped set the tone for much of the subsequent press coverage. By late 1994 Clinton was, as an amazed Pete Hamill wrote in Esquire, "the most hated president in memory."

Clinton was, and is, a sleazeball, a man whose human flaws were too grotesque to be ignored. But at some point, isn’t policy more important than personality?

ON THE Wall Street Journal’s Web site, you can purchase a CD-ROM, in both Windows and Macintosh formats, called Whitewater: The Collection, in which you can relive those halcyon days of Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell, of Susan McDougal and David Hale, of Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky.

Those were great times for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Now there’s nothing left but nostalgia.

The media, though, have a president to cover. They damn well ought to start doing it.
©2001 Dan Kennedy … dkennedy@phx.com.

Dead Letter Office

Heil Bush,

Dear Gruppenfuhrer Hollings,

Congratulations you have just been awarded the Vidkun Quisling Award for 2001. Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling and last year’s winner Volksjudge Antoni (light-fingers) Scalia.

With your vote to weaken workers safety laws and thereby save your corporate masters billions of dollars, while eliminating useless, worn out workers from corporate responsibility, you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new world.

Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 2nd class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala party in das Fuhrer Bunker, formerly the White House on 7-4-2001. We salute you Herr Hollings! Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Deputy Fuhrer Cheney

Heil Bush

Bush Energy Plan Is Just Plain Silly
By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas -- It's kind of interesting to watch large enterprises veering off course. More embarrassing is to watch two Texas oilmen produce an energy plan that's just silly.

To recap the energy "crisis," our first problem is soaring gasoline prices caused