Sunday, June 28, 1998

Those lies we told about Washington

By Dale McFeatters

The Boston Globe and the New Republic have recently dismissed star writers for fabricating stories, people and quotations. It is with deep shame and regret that this column must confess to the same crime.

We have frequently observed that the U.S. House of Representatives is being run by the Three Stooges.

The House Speaker was portrayed as a garrulous, twice-married guy with a lesbian sister and an advocate of orphanages, even for kids with parents, and traditional family values. He was said to have urged the abolition of textbooks in favor of laptops and to have shut the government down three times. The column said he appeared on the cover of his book in jeans and a leather jacket.

None of this is true, and there is no such person as Newt Gingrich. He is an invention of this column.

He was said to have two sidekicks, a surly economist with a degree from some place like Southwestern North Dakota State and a happy-go-lucky pest exterminator. Dick Armey and Tom Delay are entirely works of fiction.

Occasionally, this column invented a chum for them, a hyperactive, stage-diving Deadhead who, between frequent appearances on the local grunge rock scene, talks about shutting down the departments of Education, Energy and Commerce. John Kasich, chairman of a fictional "House Budget Committee," does not exist.

The Three Stooges, however, are real.

In the Senate, this column came up with a character named Trent Lott, a tuba-playing ex-cheerleader who sings in a barbershop quartet and who recently proposed fighting crime by teaching college students to shoot. There is no Trent Lott, and there is no such thing as a "Senate Leader."

Another frequent subject of this column was Al Gore. He was said to have turned the tables in a house of worship and taken up a collection from the nuns. This column had him claiming that he was the model for the character of Oliver Barrett in the weepy novel and movie Love Story. And the column imputed to him such goofy ideas as a satellite broadcasting nothing but an image of Earth over a 24-hour cable channel.

None of that is true. There is no Al Gore. There is no Vice President of the United States. There is no controlling legal authority.

Another invention that got out of hand was an attractive, ambitious young lawyer who went from doing sewer and zoning permits for Arkansas trailer parks to trying to socialize the whole, entire U.S. system of health care. We said she used such phrases as "okey-dokey, artichokey." We lied. There is no Hillary Rodham Clinton. There is no office of the Co-President.

Another creation was that of a big, lovable, saxophone-playing lug from Little Rock who improbably becomes president. The overgrown scamp was said to be involved in one scrape after another involving Arkansas con artists, a suicidal lawyer, Indonesian bagmen, a Hollywood hairdresser, Chinese money-launderers, rainmaking Washington lawyers and a hot sheet operation in the Lincoln Bedroom. Made up. Invented out of whole cloth. Every bit of it. President Clinton is purely a literary device.

Not content with that, this column came up with a doe-eyed brunette and tales of door-slamming sexual hijinks in the Oval Office and soulful exchanges of treasured books -- he, a volume of poetry, her, a novel about phone sex. Monica Lewinsky is entirely made up, as is her first lawyer, William "The Gabby Gourmet" Ginsburg, and her new legal team, "Plato and Jake."

It reflects no credit on us that these implausible tales passed our normally strict fact-checking and editing process.

We would like to apologize to President Dan Quayle and first lady Marilyn Quayle for any harm or hurt we may have caused by lying about the outcome of the 1992 and 1996 elections.

In sum, these fabrications were a well-intentioned but misguided effort to disprove an old and unworthy newspaper adage: "You couldn't make this stuff up. Nobody would believe it."

Scripps Howard News Service