Kerry's "butler": the latest garbage from the NYTimes.

[frank frankly]

warning: this is not a column. It is news "analysis."

warning II: this will make you sick.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh042804.shtml

THE BUTLER DOES IT! Wilgoren profiles Kerry’s “valet.” Any chance that she’s really this clueless?

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2004

THE BUTLER DOES IT: Readers, sometimes you have to throw back your head and enjoy a good laugh! On the front page of today’s New York Times, Jodi Wilgoren pens a profile of Marvin Nicholson, a campaign assistant to Candidate Kerry. How absurd is Wilgoren’s piece? Let’s use a standard we’ve used before: If such work appeared in the Washington Times, observers would laugh at the way the conservative rag was pimping those RNC spin-points.

Who is John Kerry in the RNC spin-book? As we all know, he’s a man with “a proclivity to fall on both sides of every issue”—a man who can’t give a straight answer. But he’s also a man who has too much money—a man who attended a fancy school among the troubling, French-speaking Swiss. That’s why we see RNC shills like Katharine Seelye and Nedra Pickler working such images into their stories (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/27/04). When Seelye reviewed Kerry’s military records, she managed to cite the young soldier’s “patrician manner”—a point which only she, among living humans, could find in the documents under review. Meanwhile, Pickler used her first paragraph to remind AP readers that soldier Kerry “spoke fluent French…the fruits of a privileged upbringing.” Anyone with an ounce of sense will know where these oddball spin-points come from. They come straight from the RNC; propagandists cram them into “news reports” in service to Karl Rove’s machine. Of course, Seelye performed this service for over a year in her coverage of Candidate Gore. She “made no attempt to hide her contempt for the candidate,” the Financial Times eventually observed.

And so you really have to laugh at Wilgoren’s profile this morning. In the headline, we see the first spin-point—Nicholson is described as Kerry’s “butler!” And as we read the report, the image develops. In paragraph two, we learn that Nicholson is “the man literally behind the man, ready with an uncapped bottle of water whenever Mr. Kerry’s throat runs dry.” In short order, we learn why Kerry has this “butler”—this “former caddy”—at his beck and call:

WILGOREN (pgh 6): Mr. Kerry is comfortable being catered to. He has his moods and his myriad personal needs. A social loner, he is happy with an aide half his age.