libertybelle diaries

From across the pond another American serves up some apple pie baked with some very tart apples.  Just last week it was Gennifer Flowers dishing up her own spicy sauce with reminiscences of the love of her life, Bill Clinton in the UK’s Daily Mail  (my blog post here) and then this morning with my first sip of coffee, there’s a rambling American Pie recipe to fix American journalism by none other than, Seymour Hersh, the controversial Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, in the UK’s The Guardian (the same paper that broke the Edward Snowden saga). You can read the full recipe here.  Beware the British are coming, rofl.

Hersh derides the state of American journalism and while I’ve not agreed with many of his conclusions on various stories over the years, the one thing I do admire about Hersh is that he does his own legwork, whereas it seems like the vast majority of American journalists these days are lazy slugs, who rely upon pooled information, or even worse, they cut and paste from across the internet gathering their “facts” from many dubious sources.  Sadly, our government often seems to do the same thing, as evidenced by John Kerry using the disgraced Syrian expert, Elizabeth O’Bagy’s, reporting on the disposition of Syrian rebel forces rather than intelligence from our intelligence agencies.  And it appeared to me that her map became the accepted “official” lay of the land, making me chuckle.  Long ago, in Grenada, my husband returned with tourist maps of Grenada, that they picked up at the zoo and the legend on that map highlighted useful facts about Grenada, as our elite troopers fought hut by hut , like the population of Grenada, highlighting it’s an island of “warm and friendly people”……….  Yes, Ms O’Bagy’s map is probably just as useful at determining the lay of the land in Syria.

Love him or hate him, Seymour Hersh ends with a strong tonic for fixing part of what’s wrong with America in this Guardian story: “The republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.” And he implores journalists to do something about it.

In typical libertybelle fashion, my morning began with a mad dash around the internet reading headlines that grabbed my attention, perusing blogs and checking my email.  Being in a rather reflective mood this morning, I pondered “truth” and to a lesser degree “accuracy” in reporting.  My little Jane Harman post yesterday got me ambling down this path.  We all can recite numerous occasions when our fearless leader from behind boldly charged forward to state, without hesitation, some inviolable moral stance on an issue that directly contradicts some previous inviolable stance of his.   Yes, those dastardly right-wing partisans delight in digging up the videotape and playing it back, to prove that once again he “misstated”, “misspoke” or flat out “lied” and life meanders along.  Now on the opposite side of the political aisle, he has loyal left-wing partisans, who feverishly tax their creative powers to create “narratives” to explain away the lies, replete with “composite” people.

Being one who loves to read dusty, musty old histories, this pondering about lying led me to wonder how much of the history we accept as “accurate” befell some previous “polishing” to restore the shine on pet political figures’ images?  In recent years, the ways in which we’ve been conditioned to excuse and accept “spin” (lies) makes me ponder if we can even expect any sort of accuracy from reporters.  Expecting the “truth” in a society, where actual statements and events can evaporate by sheer political pressure, even when we have videotape to easily disprove them leads me to wonder how much worse the accuracy might be before technology existed to record the actual words spoken.  Many years ago, I started this personal effort to read about my pet political figures (like George Washington – can never read too much on my hero) in their own words, as much as possible.  I pour over his letters and papers often and then I try to learn more about his connection to the various people he corresponded with and I try to understand how he approached life.

Compare now the task before current partisan hacks and their “polishing” task ahead, with trying to restore some shine to the images of the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Whenever you think Bill Clinton’s other women exposed all there is to know about their raunchy romps, rumps and ramped up tales, they gush forth with more fantastically lurid details (along with some amazing assertions).  Gennifer Flowers, in a photo-laden exposé, bares more than we want to see of her 67 year-old body in her “Ms Flowers sex advice columnist photo”, but some of the things she says bear closer scrutiny.  You can read her soulful pining for Bill here in this Daily Mail piece (full exposure here).  After all his women problems and the effort Hillary and her crack bimbo-eruption squad went to beating out these press fires with their brooms, Flowers asserts that Bill Clinton called her in 2005 in New Orleans and wanted to talk.  That struck me as incredible, yet Flowers gushes on: she claims he’s the love of her life and despite vying for his attention, she states she would support Hillary for President too.  Wow, a loyal Democrat to the end………… what’s not to admire;-)  Ms. Flowers made my point about how before technology she might have been thoroughly discredited, but thanks to her clandestine phone-recordings she had tapes to prove her story, just as Lewinsky had her infamous stained blue dress.

It’s so much easier to look at long ago history with a sense of almost reverence, but with the likes of these gabby gushers’ endless eruptions poor Hillary might need to invest in a broom factory and we all will feel like washing our hands after touching this scandal again…….  Yes, I almost had to reach for my smelling salts…… oh my gosh,  Flowers even makes a vulgar quote about Hillary’s sex life that wouldn’t fly in an American paper, but there it is in the staid ol’ UK.  I feel faint (from laughing hysterically), so it’s time to end this post.