Oh dear me. Villager Chuck Todd is in a tizzy over Stephen Colbert making a mockery of the electoral system. (As if this wasn’t enough.) It seems he’s worried that Colbert is trying to tilt the playing field and hurt the Republicans. You know, because he pretends to be one and isn’t really, so everything he does is designed as a partisan hit job.
Trudy Lieberman wrote in the May/June 1994 issue of Columbia Journalism Review:
“Bossie, the twenty-eight-year-old political director for Citizens United, a conservative Republican operation, runs an information factory whose Whitewater production lines turn out a steady stream of tips, tidbits, documents, factoids, suspicions, and story ideas for the nation’s press and for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Journalists and Hill Republicans have recycled much of the information provided by Citizens United into stories that have cast a shadow on the Clinton presidency.”
“Bossie, who says he works sixteen hours a day on Whitewater, earned his Republican stripes as the national youth director in Senator Robert Dole’s 1988 presidential campaign, and then moved on during the 1992 Bush campaign to become executive director of the Presidential Victory Committee. His boss, Floyd Brown, worked as Dole’s Midwest political director during the 1988 campaign, but is best known for producing the Willie Horton commercial that helped sink the presidential ambitions of Democrat Michael Dukakis.”
“Bossie was fired from his job as an investigator working for Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in 1998” while “investigating Clinton-Gore campaign finances.” According to a May 7, 1998, front-page article published by the Washington Post, Bossie was fired “after overseeing the release of recordings of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s phone conversations with [imprisoned] Whitewater figure Webster L. Hubbell. The tapes were edited to create the impression that Clinton was involved in billing irregularities at the Arkansas law firm where she and Hubbell worked.”
Note: According to an October 10, 2003, archived version of his Citizens United profile, Bossie said that he “was recruited to this position by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and Chairman Burton to investigate then-President Clinton’s illegal foreign money entering the United States to influence the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. Bossie managed Burton’s transition into the Chairmanship; managed a $10 million annual budget; directed personnel matters; and, supervised a 40-plus person investigative staff.”
It was only a little over a decade later that Citizens United made “Hillary: the movie” which formed the basis of the court challenge that brought us to this hideous spectacle today. David Bossie is the Republican party’s creature. And he kept up his campaign of dirty tricks and smears until he finally got a Supreme Court that would rule in favor of political lies fueled by big money being constitutionally protected speech. Feeling sorry for the Republicans because a satirist is hoisting them by their own very pointed petards is really rich.
Maybe Todd doesn’t know all that history. And maybe it doesn’t matter. But whining about satire polluting a political system that was poisoned long ago by big money and GOP machinations (with the willing help of a puerile mainstream media that lapped up what they gave them and begged for more) says everything you need to know about the sad state of political journalism. Satire is the only way we can possibly get to the truth.
Update: Froomkin calls bullshit.