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12/06/2005: Tim Noah asks the burning (to me) question.....
With our recently hitting the landmark of 1000 executions since the Supreme Court greenlighted the death penalty after a hiatus, and with Ah-nuld giving serious thought to commuting the death sentence of Crips founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams, Tim Noah in Slate asks a pertinent question: why has the press forgotten all about President Bush's most shameful public moment, his mockery of Karla Faye Tucker in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
The ugliness of a sitting governor mocking a prisoner's plea to spare her life horrified Carlson, especially after he looked up the transcript of Karla Faye Tucker's appearance on Larry King Live and discovered that nowhere did it show the prisoner asking Bush to stay the execution. It horrified a lot of other conservative journalists, too, including George Will, Richard Brookhiser, and the editorial page of the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire.
What Bush said to Carlson was so obviously awful that he had no choice but to deny he ever said it, however unconvincingly...
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A subsequent report, long after the election, that Laura Bush had dressed down her husband for his wisecrack to Carlson reduces to the vanishing point the probability that Carlson "misread" or "mischaracterized" Bush. Why scold someone for something he never said?
But then something peculiar happened. With the passage of time, reporters decided to forget the incident had ever happened. I can find no evidence that the anecdote has been reported anywhere during the past two years.
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It's almost as though the press has decided that the story is too ugly to repeat, even though it's obviously true. But at a time when the topic of governors and clemency is in the news, it's simply poor news judgment not to bring it up.
Len on 12.06.05 @ 06:55 AM CST
