corrente

And Tim's one giant turd, all right. Normally, I don't trade in scatology, but when the poop fits...And, by the way, so's his wife.*

It started early in the week, with one of those unpatented, mind-numbing grotesqueries of his that so many other equally lesser minds have learned to...well, to use the word, "ape," would be unfair to several of my favorite species, so help me out here and fill in the blank. This particular grotesquerie had to do with, who else, Senator John Kerry.

If I give you the title, "Does Teresa Heinz Trust John Kerry?
If not, why should we?", do I really have to tell you what the Noah piece proposes? Do you really need to click on that link to know that Tim will be asserting some true facts that more than adequately answer the question he poses, (why Kerry's wife's Heinz heiress wealth is not available to Kerry for his campaign - a pre-nup agreement signed at the time of marriage, 18 years ago) which will be followed by wild, even crazed speculations, (about how, despite statements by Kerry's wife, Teresa, that she would consider using her own money to defend him against unjust campaign attacks, she can't legally, and she must know that) that are meant to distract you from the fact that matters, a pre-nup agreement, followed by more distracting speculation based on meaningless details, and then the switcheroo lie, a question about "back then" if the pre-nup was even necessary, given Heinz-Kerry's age, 65, though back then, her age was 65 minus eighteen, all this argumentation having the express goal of distracting you from the clear fact that there is no "here" here.

So Teresa Heinz Kerry could have found ways to make her money available to her husband in the foregone likelihood that he would run for President, the evidence here for her certain knowledge that he would, the fact that Morley Safer noticed Kerry's ambition in a thirty-two year old 60 Minute interview. True, Noah admits, many rich couples sign pre-nups, but not all, for example, Paul McCartney didn't.

Okay, you can see where Tim is leading you -- into the very heart of the whopping turd that is Tim Noah.

To be sure, Kerry had every expectation, heading into the 2004 race, that he was going to lead the pack in fund raising, which he did for awhile. But Heinz Kerry has been around politics long enough to know that a presidential candidate can't count on anything. And she had the example of George W. Bush's nomination race in 2000 before her to show that presidential candidates don't always stay within the limits imposed by public financing.

Heinz Kerry must have had some inkling that the day might come when her second husband would need her money. And knowing that, she didn't make it available. That doesn't make her a bad wife. But it does raise a disconcerting question for voters. If Teresa Heinz Kerry won't give John Kerry the keys to the car, why should we?

This isn't reporting. This isn't commentary. This isn't even punditry. It's not even, God help us, gasbaggery. It's gossip. Pure, but quite complex gossip. Speculative assertions, for which there is no direct hard evidence, offered in the tone of the knowing insider, who definitely has the dirt you want to hear, repeated and repeated within the gossip narrative, and destined to be repeated and repeated in other versions of the same gossip narrative, until the speculations take on the patina of unquestionable fact - which is precisely how gossip works, isn't it?

For example, later in the week, TNR blog, &c. took Noah to task for the inadquate quality of his gossip narrative, though they did find that he'd made a "provocative" case that " Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of John (and John before that) can't possibly trust her husband with her copious wealth." The problem with Noah's column is not that it's gossip based on speculation, the problem is that Noah's gossip narrative isn't nearly as clever as the gossip narrative this New Republic band of turds can come up with.

The relevant characteristic here isn't Heinz's savvy; it's her arrogance--the kind of arrogance most rich people have when it comes to how and when they spend their money. Heinz probably assumed, not improbably, that no measly campaign finance restriction was really going to keep her from spending money on her husband's campaign. After all, if worst came to worst, she could always go ahead and break the law and pay the fines down the road.

So, Noah isn't wrong about Kerry Heinz not trusting her husband with her money, he's just wrong about Kerry Heinz herself, who "is probably not nearly as shrewish and diabolical as Noah takes her to be."

Had enough? Dying to go take a shower? Sorry, I'm not through yet.

Another gossipy item was floated early in the week, by Instaturd in this case, i.e., that a Vanity Fair piece on Joe Wilson and his wife, that is accompanied by a snapshot of both in which Mrs. W is wearing large dark sunglasses, and her hair, already identified as blonde, is mainly hidden under a scarf, that also obscures the shape and details of her face, proves that both Wilsons are nothing more nor less than attention-seeking self-promoters, and that the entire Plame scandal was a bogus one. The piece has been artfully dealt with by others, notably Hesiod, T. Bogg, a don't miss, and Atrios, who offers two other good links.

I didn't think this one would have legs; why oh why, when it comes to gauging this Republican party's shamelessness, am I always behind the count? I realized I was wrong when Wolf picked up on this non-story story within hours of its first appearance among Republican and right wing ranks. CNN ran with it all week. And yesterday, Howie Kurtz was given special CNN moments to sling manure at both Wilsons, secure in the knowledge that the entirety of Plamegate had been certified by Tim Noah as the Whopper of the Week.

Was there ever any doubt that once such a manure smeared whopper of a juggernaut was launched, Tim Noah would be scrambling aboard? Well, he does more than that. He attempts, successfully, to top all the other turdmasters, proclaiming that Mrs. Wilson's failure to hide in her house and not be seen during daylight hours, once she'd been exposed as an agent, (even though, unmentioned by Noah, she'd always had a high public profile, except that no one knew she was actually a CIA agent), culminating in the Vanity Fair piece, effectively ends Plamegate, i.e., any questions that might need to be answered by the Bush administration, and suggests, instead, that we should now be questioning whether we can believe Mr. Wilson's story?

As if that story hasn't been vetted all over the place already by what passes for a press in this country.

None of this comes as any surprise to you, I know. One hopeful sign this week, a commentator on a Slate thread does a fine job of explicating why Mickey Kaus is a gossip columnist, although he's far to sanguine about the issue of Mickey's motives.

So, aside from providing an opportunity for angry venting, why do I bother with a post like this? Because the mode of gossip is, by now, so firmly and invisibly entrenched in our political discourse that nine out of ten times it goes unnoticed.

Example: Remember back in the nineties, Senator Thompson's investigation into the whole issue of campaign finance, with what turned out to be an exclusive emphasis on the unpretty attempts by the Clintons, during the 95 Presidential campaign, to keep up with the Republicans?

Thompson was everyone's hero among pundits; he was the good Republican who would guide a reasonable, fair investigation into the perfidy of the bad Clintons, and yet, on the opening day of the hearings, Senator Thompson made headlines by accusing the administration of playing treasonable footsies with the Chinese, a claim for which no evidence was ever provided. You remember that? And do you remember that after some weeks of this kind of "fairness," Senator John Glenn got good and mad, uncharacteristically, and accused Senator Thompson of running a partisan investigation that left untouched Republican sins against the campaign finance laws? You would have thought that Sen. Glenn, American hero extraordinaire, quiet Democratic centrist, would have had the credibility to make some in the press actually listen to him, and take a look at what was actually going on, day after day, in those committee hearings. And you would have been wrong.

Instead, from Al Hunt to Mark Shields to Novak, to Matthews, well, pretty much all the gasbags, John Glenn was pronounced a "disappointment," and accussed of being the partisan one. One missing piece of this story was why John Glenn would risk his reputation in a partisan defense of, of all things in the world, the Clinton adminbistration. And soon, we had the answer. NASA announced that Glenn, at the age of seventy something, would return to space, not just for the fun of it, but to provide a now considerably aged body upon which to measure the effects of space travel.

Was there even a remote possibility that these two events, Sen Glenn's uncharacteristically partisan anger at the partisan nature of Sen. Thompsons campaign finance inquiry and this NASA story weren't somehow linked? Of course not. And what was the link? A deal between President Clinton and Sen. Glenn; if Glenn would uncharacteristically get partisonally angry at Thompson, Clinton would approve Glenn's second trip into space. Not a shred of evidence was ever presented by any of the numerous commentators who ran with this story. And yet the story covered any further need to ask whether or not Glenn's objections to the Thompson committee, even after it was pronounced a failure by most pundits, for not having gotten the goods on the Clinton administration, were fair and accurate. (They were, of course.)

It never seemed to occur to any of the gasbags that making such a deal was even more uncharacteristic of Senator Glenn than his partisan anger. Nor did the story make any kind of sense on its face. Once it was made known that NASA was interested in having Glenn go back into space, and it was a great story from NASA's point of view, how on earth could President Clinton have kept it from happening, politically speaking? There was absolutely no reason for Senator Glenn to make such a deal, and no way for Clinton to enforce it.

Thus was a highly credible Democratic complaint about the Republican cooking of evidence against the Clinton administration discredited. To this day, you will hear Republicans get away with the same accusations of quasi-treasonous fund raising by the Clinton administration. You think that doesn't matter? It does. It's why the Bush administration gets away with presenting itself as restoring honor and integrity to the White House.

Obvious next step - what do we do about this? I have some notions, but I'm exhausted for now. How about you tell me your thoughts on the matter. That's what the comment threads are for, right?

*Here's evidence of why "so's his wife."