This chyron pic.twitter.com/Op2z0aBeZj
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) January 23, 2017
Mr. Pierce, at Esquire:
It was quite a weekend for official mendacity. Kellyanne Conway went sailing off into a truthless land into which not even Richard Nixon ever set down his polished cordovans. And she did so in defense of Sean Spicer’s very public episode on madness on Sunday evening. I think “alternative facts” is going to be sticking around as a meme, as the kidz call them, for quite a while now. But the real story of this weekend actually was something that happened in 1974.
In August of that year, the White House tape finally emerged that drove Nixon from power and placed in his stead Gerald Ford, an earnest congressional lifer whose record indicated that he would not be a crook, which pretty much was all the country was looking for in a president back then. Ford staffed his administration with people around whom he felt comfortable and, after six years of having an antisocial paranoid in the Oval Office, the country was OK with that, too.
Ford picked as his press secretary one Jerald terHorst, a longtime Detroit newspaperman who was at that moment writing a biography of Ford which, I would imagine, needed extensive rewrites. terHorst had the job for only a month…
On September 8, Ford pardoned Nixon for “for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” This, as many people including me have argued, was a capital mistake and kickstarted the process of infantilizing the American public into people who would not be able to cope with impeaching Ronald Reagan over Iran-Contra, or probing too deeply into the events leading up to the attacks of 9/11, or bringing true justice down on the torturers and Wall Street brigands of the first decade of the 21st century…
It took terHorst less than a day to resign in protest against what Ford had done. His grounds were that he had stood in front of the White House press corps for a month and denied that a pardon would be forthcoming. Now, Ford had taken his legs out from under him and terHorst felt that he could not in good conscience continue to be a spokesman for an administration that had done so, even though he was a longtime personal friend of the president, and even though his departure would make Ford’s decision look even more dubious….
And that’s what the big story of this weekend was—that once, in Washington, there were people unwilling to sell their consciences so cheaply, and that there were people who knew that there were things bigger than The Job or The Boss…
YOU OWN THIS, REPUBLICANS!
Remember when Donald Trump went all over the country during a prez campaign saying "You damn well knew I was a snake before you took me in"?
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) January 24, 2017
(To be fair, he was ostensibly using it as a metaphor for how scary refugees and immigrants are.)
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) January 24, 2017
A Note from History on “Alternative Facts”Post + Comments (66)