For use: Sunday, October 8, 2000 and thereafter

mfinley.com: "Lies About Lying"

by Michael Finley

The political season has turned me once again into a churning-intestined compulsive. It doesn’t happen every year -- last time it happened was 1972. But today we have the luxury of hourly updates on every rumor, every trivial development, from subliminable rats to arthritic dogs.

I visit sites like The Daily Howler, (dailyhowler.com/), The Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com/), and Political Information (www.politicalinformation.com/headlines.html) several times a day, plus the usual news channels, hoping for some latest smidgeon of gossip or news. I am the big fish at the end of the 24-hour news chain.  I would much sooner see Al Gore elected than George Bush, and I take all the mischief directed against my candidate personally.

Having said that, and having denuded myself of any claim to objectivity, I still have a little partisan peep to make. It is about "Al Gore's notorious lies."

New organizations and editorial writers know, because they can look to the original record, that:

• Gore really was, with Tommy Lee Jones, the model for the preppie guy in Erich Segal's Love Story. Siegel admits as much. Gore went wrong when he stated that he and Tipper were the basis -- perhaps to be gallant and include his wife? In any event, his basic statement is perfectly true -- and speaks to him having been a striking and admirable young man.
• Gore really did have a hand in the legislative part of the creation of the Internet, which is all he ever claimed. He never said he "invented" the Internet, for which he has been pilloried and misquoted a thousand times. Heck, if he made even a modest legislative contribution to designing this wonderful thing -- and he did -- he deserves our thanks, not our raspberries.
• He really did hold the first hearings on "Love Canal" type toxic waste dumps. He really did have a hand in creating the Superfund. He was a Eagle Scout environmentally minded senator -- perfectly in character with everything else we know about him.
• Al Gore really did work summers at his folks' farm in Carthage as a boy, and people who knew him say he worked like a dog -- that his father made him work like a dog, "to make a man out of him." He is a very hard worker.
• The silver-spoon, "Fairfax Hotel upbringing" lie is especially unfair because it overlooks that the Fairfax, which is today a posh luxury residence, was gentrified in the 1980s. Prior to that, it was a nice enough hotel that had seen better days.
• Gore's mother-in-law really does take Lodine, and so does his dog. But the prices he claimed each paid for the drug came not from household receipts but from a congressional committee report. But the media jumped on this as if it really mattered.
• The "Kailey Ellis has to stand in class" story originated not with Gore but in a news story in a Florida newspaper. The story appears to be wrong, and Gore failed to fact-check it for accuracy. But that's not the same as making up a whopper, which is what he's been accused of. But the root evil in this instance is inaccurate news reporting, not willful deception by Gore.

Though he has been wrongfully accused of fibbing on these matters, I do not want to deny there is something a little rubbery about Gore's penchant for stretching things. Some of this can be traced to his personality, which I think is sometimes just a bit too clever to be truly clever.

But how bad is that, really? And how unusual is it in a politician, for whom every citizen encounter is implicitly a sales event? Don't other people running for office routinely put themselves in the best available light?

I'm not saying Al Gore is a great man. He sometimes puzzles me. But government, and by extension we, would be up the creek without people like him willing to take a few shots to make things better. That's his "peculiarity," and it speaks far more to naivete and an old-fashioned sense of duty (again, not unlike Bush) than being a pathological liar, as reporters and pundits pathologically and intentionally mislead us into suspecting.

When people pull the levers in November, they will want to factor Gore's little peculiarity into their thinking. But do not let that be a substitute for thinking, because the entire "liar, liar" charge has been carefully cultivated over a year's time by a cohort of conservative pundits, and execrable reporters, who know in their hearts that their own charges of embellishment are embellished -- but what's a little mischief in the quest for "character"?