When last the world heard from Robert Parry, the formerly half-respectable journalist ( Newsweek, Frontline) was trumpeting his discovery of the "October Surprise," an alleged mega-conspiracy by which Republican greybeards bribed the Iranian mullahs to delay release of their U.S. embassy captives until after Ronald Reagan could defeat Jimmy Carter in November 1980. You remember: George Bush was supposed to have flown secretly to Paris by supersonic jet right in the middle of the 1980 campaign for a quick meeting to seal this corrupt bargain, and . . .
And, well, the whole story was revealed to be laughably phony, and Parry then all but dropped from view. But it turns out he has kept himself busy enough -- as master of an Internet-based "investigative" outfit called Consortiumnews, where he has continued to spin out ludicrous conspiracy theories. The latest of which, oddly enough, has just been picked up and published by the Washington Monthly, an otherwise reasonably mainstream magazine printed on actual paper.
Why the Monthly would embarrass itself by association with a fringe character like Parry is a mystery known only to its editors. But the results are vastly entertaining for connoisseurs of the peculiar psychological process by which engage, left-leaning scribblers have transformed themselves into apologists for anything and anyone associated with the Clinton White House. For it is Parry's latest brainstorm that Vice President Al Gore's reputation as a resume-polishing braggart is the product of a self-conscious smear campaign by the establishment media.
Why would ordinary reporters enlist in such a campaign? Because, Parry writes in the Monthly's April issue, "savaging Gore protects them from the 'liberal' label that can so damage a reporter's career." Either that, or reporters are "venting residual anger over President Clinton's survival of the Monica Lewinsky scandal."
Either that, THE SCRAPBOOK would helpfully add, or reporters are simply trying to tell the truth, and Al Gore really is a resume-polishing braggart.
Which is what Parry's supposedly exculpatory analysis of Gore's "claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump," the centerpiece of his article, actually suggests. Parry wants to prove that the press has "exaggerated Al Gore's exaggerations" through "fabrication of damaging quotes and misrepresentation of his meanings." But try as he tortuously does, Parry cannot explain away the unexpurgated text of the vice president's remarks last November to a group of high school students in New Hampshire.
Alerted in the late 1970s to a toxic waste dump in Toone, Tennessee, Gore told his adolescent audience, "I called for a congressional investigation and hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee -- that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."
Gore was not claiming to have discovered and first publicized Love Canal, sayeth Robert Parry. Guess it all depends on what the meaning of the word "found" is.