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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (9735)	12/1/1999 9:45:00 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Our watchdog media shines again: Prestige Press Struggles to Keep Bogus Bush Coke Charge Alive The New York Times had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to cover Juanita Broaddrick's rape charge against President Clinton, and then did so only as a media story. The Old Gray Lady has never even mentioned allegations, backed by multiple on-the-record sources, that Clinton was a regular user of the "N" word. And as for the five people who claim to know something about Clinton's past cocaine use - well, don't hold your breath. Still, apparently the Times just can't get enough of the completely unsourced and by now thoroughly discredited charge that George W. Bush was once arrested on a cocaine rap. How else does one explain Tuesday's report on page A-18 of the Times' main news section: "Scuttled by Its Wary Publisher, Bush Biography Finds New One." The biography is Fortunate Son, which caused such a scandal for St. Martin's Press back in October that heads rolled and copies were pulled from the shelf. Why? Because its author, J. H. Hatfield, turns out to have been an ex-con who once tried to have his boss murdered. When Hatfield was positively ID'd, then lied anyway about his felonious past, St. Martin's decided that he'd simply made up the most newsworthy passage in his book, the part having to do with Bush's imaginary coke bust. Yet neither Mr. Hatfield's checkered past, nor the failure of even one of his alleged sources for the Bush coke anecdote to step forward, deterred the Times, which mainstream media types still describe with a straight face as "the paper of record." Now the book has found a willing publisher, a 28-year-old former Kinko's worker who plans a 25,000-copy second printing. It seems the folks at West 43rd St. will cover anything if it keeps a good anti-Bush story alive, even if it means publicizing total trash. Not to be outdone, the Washington Post - which refused to cover Gennifer Flowers' coke charge against Clinton despite having a tape of her making it played into their answering machine - has gotten even more creative than the Times in its attempt to resuscitate the Bush coke story. Somewhere out there in cyberspace, somebody has faked a picture of W. actually snorting a line or two of the white stuff. The Post, pretending it had stumbled onto stop-the-presses material, rushed a story about the dummied-up photo into its Monday edition - on page two, no less. Yes, a lawyer for the Bush campaign complained about the web-posted picture, giving Posties a slender pretext to cover the dirty-trick photography. Still, one wonders how the Post missed the hundreds of Clinton-photo parodies that have been floating around cyberspace for years. Or even actual unretouched photos, such as stills from the First Brother's police surveillance video, showing Roger Clinton cutting his coke and using the "N" word like it was going out of style. But why report on something that actually happened when there are so many anti-GOP fantasies the prestige press can revel in, like the elusive Bush cocaine story?