The Truthiness Will Come Back to Haunt You (The Hidden Frank Rich)

22 Jan 06 Edition

Before we get to the meat of the matter in Mr. Rich's column, a bit of history on its title--Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito (full column available to Times Select subscribers). You may have heard that the word (or, in this case, the faux word) "truthiness" was selected by a group of cunning linguists as the word of the year. Here's the original story from Heather Clark of the Associated Press (via the Seattle Times):

A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

The American Dialect Society chose the word Friday after a runoff with terms related to Hurricane Katrina, such as "Katrinagate," the scandal erupting from the lack of planning for the monster hurricane.

Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, said "truthiness" means "truthy, not facty."

"The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts," he said. "Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going make much progress."

OK. Basic reporting there--providing what the word means and a quote about its relevance right near the top. [ed note - I don't think I ever heard the word Katrinagate used last year; a lotta gates were bandied about, but I think "clusterf***" was used more in conjunction with the Katrina aftermath than anything else.] But Ms. Clark never noted in her story where the word "truthiness" actually came from, which really gives the story a bit more gloss. For those of you not in the know, it originated with Stephen Colbert from his The Wørd segment on his debut show back in October of ought-5 (which you can watch at the Comedy Central site, via Windows Media). Mr. Colbert had some choice words for the AP and Heather Clark, naming them as the Number 1 threat in America in the Colbert Report's Threat Down (watch here), and HuffPo commentator Adam Green rants up a storm over this with this column, which includes contact information for Ms. Clark if your dander is up over this slight.

OK, so with that joke explained (and thoroughly beaten as one would do with a metaphorical dead horse), on to Mr. Rich's column. He starts out taking down author James Frey (author of the fictional memoir, A Million Little Pieces (which, I might add is still going gangbusters over at Amazon, where it's still sitting in the Top 10 in the book store), who he names as emblamatic of the notion of truthiness as the Sherman McCoy character from Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities so perfectly portrayed Wolfe's "master of the universe" concoction. But then he brings it all back around to the political realm, adding a heaping serving of Alito with egg on the face of the Senate Democrats:

This isn't just a slippery slope. It's a toboggan into chaos, or at least war. As everyone knows now - except for the 22 percent, according to a recent Harris poll, who still believe that Saddam helped plan 9/11 - it's the truthiness of all those imminent mushroom clouds that sold the invasion of Iraq. What's remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in "The Wizard of Oz" - FEMA's heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance - we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It's as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.

Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don't understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It's the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional. The Frey-like genius of the right is its ability to dissemble with a straight face while simultaneously mustering the slick media machinery and expertise to push the goods. It not only has the White House propaganda operation at its disposal, but also an intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets that are far more effective than their often hapless liberal counterparts.

The selling of Samuel Alito is a perfect illustration of how our world works. From the moment Judge Alito emerged from Harriet Miers's penumbra, his supporters' story line was clear: he'd be presented as a humble exemplar of American values too mainstream to be labeled "out of the mainstream" by his opponents. In his first courtesy calls on Capitol Hill in November, we learned, Judge Alito often cited his father as a proud immigrant who instilled in him empathy for minorities and the poor - an empathy not remotely apparent in the judge's legal record. A particularly poignant anecdote had it that his father had once defended a black basketball player from discrimination in college.

Yet David Kirkpatrick of The Times reported then that "some colleagues and friends of the elder Mr. Alito, who died in 1987, said they had never heard some of the stories his son has recounted, including the episode about his support for the black student and the fact that his father immigrated from Italy as a child." No matter. If such questions couldn't stop an Oprah Book Club selection, they certainly wouldn't stop a nominee to the Supreme Court.

Once Judge Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats decided to counter the Republicans' story by coming up with a fictional story of their own, or that's what they did once they stopped bloviating. Their fictional biography cast Judge Alito as an out-and-out bigot. The major evidence cited to support this characterization was his listing his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a conservative group founded in reaction to the upheavals of the Vietnam era, on a job application for the Reagan Justice Department.

Judge Alito testified that he had joined CAP because it supported the R.O.T.C. on campus, adding that he did not remember having "done anything substantial in relation to this group, including renewing my membership." The Democrats plunged on, betting the house (or the Supreme Court) on Teddy Kennedy's insistence that Judge Alito could be linked to what the senator described as CAP's "repulsive anti-woman, anti-black, anti-disability, anti-gay pronouncements." In one of only two dramatic moments in the whole soporific confirmation process - a "Sunshine Boys"-style spat with the committee chairman, Arlen Specter - Mr. Kennedy threatened to subpoena CAP "documents in the possession of the Library of Congress" to hunt down Judge Alito's bigotry.

There was only one problem with the Democrats' fictional story line: it had been exposed as fake on the front page of The Times weeks before Mr. Kennedy presented it to the nation. Mr. Kirkpatrick reported that he had examined the same papers Mr. Kennedy was threatening to subpoena - as well as some others at Princeton's own library - and found no trace of Judge Alito's involvement with CAP as either an active participant or a major donor. When the Senate committee did Mr. Kennedy's bidding and looked at those documents yet again, it found exactly what The Times had in November, calling the senator's bluff and ending any remote chance the Democrats had for keeping Judge Alito off the court. It says everything about the Democrats' ineptitude that when they spin fiction, they are incapable of meeting even the low threshold of truthiness needed to make it fly in this lax cultural environment.

THE Republicans would never have been so sloppy. Indeed, hardly had Mr. Kennedy's melodramatic stunt blown up in his face than they came up with a new story line prompted by the other dramatic incident in the hearings: the departure of Martha-Ann Alito from the committee room in tears. She fled while a Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, was mocking the Democrats, not when the eminently mockable Democrats were mounting their lame assault. Whatever. As Time magazine later reported, a P.R. outfit called Creative Response Concepts immediately pumped up the media volume of her supposed martyrdom, breathlessly producing a former Alito clerk to provide eyewitness testimony of her suffering at the hands of those Democratic brutes.

Creative Response Concepts did similar work for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 campaign. Its roster of clients also includes the right-wing Media Research Center, itself the parent organization of something called the Cybercast News Service. For the new year, Cybercast News has an exciting fictional project of its own: just before John Murtha, the tough Congressional critic of the Iraq war, appeared on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, it started Swift Boating him by rewriting his Vietnam history to besmirch the legitimacy of his two Purple Hearts.