Let's All Play Hunt the Hypocrites

AUSTIN, Texas — There's a beaut of a media story happening right in front of our eyes, and if you want to have a good time, you can start tracking this one yourself. The game is called "Hunt the Hypocrites," or "What's Wrong with This Picture?"

A few weeks ago, I kept running into civilians (non-journalists) who all had the same question: Why isn't this Newt Gingrich story a bigger deal?

The story, in case you missed it (and you may well have), is that the former speaker of the House is getting a divorce because he has been having an affair with a much younger woman. I think that story got exactly the play it deserved — almost none.

Gingrich seems to be a spent cartridge as a politician. All that speculation about whether he would run for president is long gone — no more Time magazine Man of the Year, no more "defender of civilization" or lectures on how liberal policies cause moral decay in America.

However, Gingrich is still huge on the fund-raising circuit. Since he left office in January, he has raised $1.3 million for his new political action committee. So he is still a public figure to some extent, and under the new rules of journalism, his private life is a story.

Of course, there is the oddball angle to the story. It turns out that Gingrich was having this long-running affair with the much younger woman all during the time the government of the United States all but came to a crashing halt over Monica Lewinsky.

This is the man who promised that Republican leadership would "improve the moral climate of the country." So this presents us with an epochal moment in the history of hypocrisy. As Gingrich led the Republicans in full hue and cry concerning the moral sleaze, the sordid tawdriness, the unbearable, brazen shameless conduct of Bill Clinton, he was having something more than a flingette himself. We could be looking at a new world record for being two-faced.

But note the deafening silence from the media. It's the same problem they have dealing with George W. Bush and drugs. (I am proceeding on the new media premise that he must have done coke because he sure as hell would have denied it by now if he hadn't. I like these new journalism rules — it's so much easier than having to go dig up evidence.)

And of course, Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard instead of having to go to Vietnam because of who his father was. How bright do you have to be to figure that out? As cartoonist Ben Sargent put it: "Find me a rich, Yale-educated congressman's son in 1968 who DIDN'T get help staying out of the draft — now THAT would be a story."

Note the astounding difference between the way the media covered Hillary Clinton's interview in Talk magazine — the one in which she did NOT excuse her husband's infidelity — and a far more interesting piece in the same issue of the same magazine about Bush, in which he cruelly mimics an imaginary plea for life from the executed Karla Faye Tucker.

Acres of air time on Mrs.

Clinton's supposed effort to excuse her husband, hours of tutting and judgmental commentary and psychological parsing of the Clinton marriage; almost nothing (honorable exception to George Will) on the appalling vulgarity of W. Bush.

And then there is the even messier problem of Dubya's business dealings.

You thought Whitewater was a story? Wait'll you read this one. Where's Kenneth Starr now that we need him? And yet, you notice, the media reaction to all this is curiously ... muted. Gone are the full-scale scrums of yesteryear, when packs of baying reporters surrounded Bill Clinton, the badgering about the draft, the screaming front-page tabloid headlines, the saturation television coverage. So what's the deal?

Two things.

One, the media have been so hideously unfair to Clinton that they are now in an incredible box. They can't savage this nice, young Bush boy the way they did Clinton, or the sheer ugliness and unfairness of it will turn everyone against the media, not against Bush. On the other hand, if they dismiss Bush's "youthful indiscretions" as he wants them to, they abandon all hope of appearing even-handed.

Numero two-o, what's missing here is the right-wing echo chamber and amplification system. There is a fascinating study in the spring issue of The Public Eye, put out by Political Research Associates in Boston, of the right-wing media chain that often starts with some story or non-story dug up by an outfit funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

But before we get ourselves off into "vast right-wing conspiracy" territory, may I make a suggestion? Both the media and the nation will be spared enormous travail if we stop pretending that politicians are here to provide moral leadership.

That way, we won't have to listen to little Georgie Bush, the frat boy, lecture us all about responsibility and purpose and family values and moral uplift and chastity and abstinence and all the rest of it.

Instead, we can sit down and try to figure out whether he's smart enough to run the country.

You want moral leadership? Try the clergy. It's their job.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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