Nearly two weeks later, the right’s smear of 12-year-old Graeme Frost and his family is long over, but the problems for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.) remain. His office was, as we know, directly involved in pushing the attacks on the Frosts, but just as importantly, McConnell appears to have been caught lying about it.
And as the saying goes, sometimes the cover-up is at least as bad as the crime.
By now, we’ve all heard the play-by-play. Right-wing activists went after the Frost family, and McConnell’s spokesperson contacted political reporters, urging them to pick up on the story. Later, after learning that the conservative hatchet men were wrong, an embarrassed McConnell aide backpedaled and discouraged his media contacts from pursuing the bogus story.
The aide, Don Stewart, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that he briefed his boss on all of this last Thursday. As it turns out, that’s the problem.
Mitch McConnell can’t have it both ways. He can’t luxuriate in a reputation for personal caution and political control, yet claim he knew nothing about the role his office tried to play in sliming a Baltimore boy and his family when they came forward in support of the SCHIP health care expansion.
Mr. Stewart told The Courier-Journal he explained all that to his boss on Thursday. So Sen. McConnell was deliberately untruthful the next day, when he told WHAS-TV’s Mark Hebert, “There was no involvement whatsoever.” The senator will object to any suggestion of lying, but what else is it when you knowingly misrepresent facts?
It’s clear what Mitch McConnell knew and when he knew it. It’s clear he deceived the public when he answered Mr. Hebert as he did about the e-mail sent by his press agent.
Mr. McConnell is so used to Washington-style gamesmanship and inside-the-beltway rules that he has forgotten what constituents back in Kentucky want: the simple truth.
That’s from an editorial in today’s Courier-Journal, Kentucky’s largest newspaper, under a headline that reads, “McConnell versus truth.”
It’s worth taking a moment, at this point, to realize that the Kentucky press is skewering the Senate Minority Leader for lying — while the political press in DC apparently couldn’t care less.
Greg Sargent argued:
I know, the “let’s imagine if a Dem had done this” game is a cliche. But let’s play it anyway. Imagine if a top communications staffer for Harry Reid tried to get mainstream reporters to follow the lead of lefty bloggers who were digging into the background of, and harassing, a young boy who had appeared in a GOP ad for some policy initiative or another — and then imagine if Reid were caught lying about it.
Lefty bloggers wouldn’t have taken this route, of course, but if this had happened and Reid had done this, I think the cable networks would be all over it. CNN’s internet reporter would do a segment on it, Wolf Blitzer would grunt with disapproval, Chris Matthews would drench the Hardball camera with spittle flecks, Richard Cohen would question Reid’s character, David Broder would shake his head and mutter darkly about “incivility” and Reid’s incompetence, Howie Kurtz would write a story about the coverage of the story, and the rest would be history. That Reid staffer would end up resigning.
Dems are now out there attacking McConnell. Yet we’re hearing nothing about this key twist in the story. At the very least you’d think this would be fodder for the cable nets.
I agree with all of this, but there’s a twist. McConnell lied to reporters who knew they were being lied to. That is, journalists got the tip from McConnell’s aide directly, so when the senator denied his office was involved, they knew immediately that the Minority Leader was being intentionally deceptive.
But the reporters didn’t say anything. Digby suggests it’s because news outlets need emails like Stewart’s, and can’t disrupt the process.
[A]fter watching them for the past two decades very closely, I think it’s obvious that what interests the media more than anything is access and gossip and vicious little smears piled one atop the other. And why not? They are easy to report, require no mind numbing shuffling of financial reports or struggling through arcane policy papers. In fact, the press has made a virtue of the simple-mindedness by calling what used to be known as gossip, “character issues”, which are used to stand in for judgment about policy.
The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby used “the wife sent him on a boondoggle” line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm. […]
The reason they won’t pursue McConnell unless absolutely forced to do so (if that’s even possible) is because they are implicated in stories like this. You’ll notice that nobody in the press revealed that they had received that memo. But we know they did…. [T]he last thing in the world they want is for Mitch McConnell’s stooges and others like them to stop sending those delightfully bitchy tid-bits over the transom. Why, that would be as bad as being kicked off the Kewl Kidz High cheerleading squad.
It’s an ugly game, isn’t it? At least Kentucky outlets are going after McConnell’s obvious mendacity, even if the DC media won’t.