Of Lies, Catfights and Rock 'n' Roll ....the media & the unrebuttable lie

the liberal media | posted November 8, 2007 (November 26, 2007 issue)
Of Lies, Catfights and Rock 'n' Roll

Eric Alterman

In Tom Stoppard's brilliant new play, Rock 'n' Roll, Max, a Marxist academic, explains to his lunch guests that "newspapers are part of the system and truth is relative to that single fact."
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Though official lies will always be with us, our political life has recently been poisoned by an even more insidious phenomenon: the "unrebuttable lie."

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In Maureen Dowd's bizarre October 31 New York Times column, she lies about Hillary Clinton: "Her husband's sexual behavior, quite apart from the private pain that it has caused her, has also sullied her deepest--and most womanly--ideals and convictions, for the Clintons' political partnership has demanded that she defend actions she knows to be indefensible."

In fact, Dowd's lie is at least partially rebuttable. Senator Clinton has never defended her husband's sexual behavior. Dowd is simply making that up. More interesting are her claims regarding what the senator "knows to be indefensible." How the hell does Maureen Dowd know what Hillary is thinking or how and why she values her marriage? All marriages are mysterious to those outside them, but Dowd--who has never been married and has no children--gives chutzpah a bad name with her unrebuttable lies about Hillary's thoughts and feelings as a wife and mother.

But believe it or not, Dowd is only warming up. Quoting the antifeminist Atlantic Monthly essayist Caitlin Flanagan, she piles on, "Ms. Flanagan...was particularly bothered by Hillary's callousness in dumping Socks, the beloved White House cat and best-selling author, on Bill's former secretary Betty Currie."

No, the above is not an Onion-inspired Maureen Dowd parody. It is, in fact, a literal catfight in which an allegedly serious New York Times columnist quotes an allegedly serious Atlantic Monthly writer who complains of the way a presidential candidate treats her daughter's cat. It's almost beside the point that, at least according to Sidney Blumenthal, this story is also a lie. To cruelly mix my animal metaphors, to attempt to rebut this crazy cat tale is by definition to lie down with pigs.

But curiously, as Stoppard observed of Barrett's tormentors, cruel and dishonest as they may be, these lies remain merely a "kind of style." In Stoppard's magnificent play, the catty columnist in question is justly beaten over the head with her newspaper by her prospective daughter-in-law. If only American democracy were more like Rock 'n' Roll...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/alterman