KENNEDY'S SMOOTH RIDE TURNS BUMPY

It's hard to imagine that Patrick Kennedy would have gotten elected
to Congress a dozen years ago without his last name.

It's equally hard to imagine that the media would be going wild about
his late-night car crash and prescription drug addiction if he
weren't a Kennedy.

The only lingering mystery is why national news organizations didn't
pounce earlier on the Rhode Island Democrat's long history of alcohol
and drug abuse, depression and a series of downright embarrassing incidents.

The answer in large measure is that Kennedy hasn't been a very
important House member. But given the journalistic obsession with the
Kennedy family and its tragicomic soap opera, he does seem to have
gotten an easy ride -- except in the New England press, which has
chronicled his every misstep.

While Kennedy, the 38-year-old son of Ted Kennedy, was widely
reported to have held a news conference Friday, it was nothing of the
sort. He read a statement designed to elicit sympathy, saying he was
going into rehab, and took no questions. This amounted to an age-old
damage-control technique: changing the subject.

Kennedy refused to respond to questions about his crashing into a
Capitol police barrier at 2:45 a.m. Thursday and whether he had been
drinking -- as one Hill bartender told the Boston Herald -- or, as he
has maintained, was in a stupor caused by Ambien and another
prescription drug. The story gained the whiff of a cover-up when a
Capitol Police supervisor blocked any sobriety test.

When national news organizations last week began throwing together
their congressman-in-trouble profiles -- along with the inevitable
Ambien sidebars -- there was a long list of local clips to pore over.

In 1991, while a state representative, Kennedy acknowledged --
following a National Enquirer story -- having used cocaine as a
teenager, but said he had kicked the habit years earlier by checking
into a treatment center.

In 2000 alone, Kennedy got into a scuffle with an airport security
guard, who said he shoved her during an argument about oversize
luggage; admitted taking antidepressants; was accused by a charter
company of causing $28,000 in damage to a rented sailboat; and, after
a few drinks and an argument, had a distraught date call the Coast
Guard to be rescued from his chartered yacht.

Just last month, Kennedy hit another car in a Rhode Island parking lot.

Relatively little of this drew significant national coverage. Among
the brief mentions in the New York Times, a 2002 piece on Kennedy's
reelection campaign included a paragraph on his personal problems,
quoting the congressman as saying: "If you are a Kennedy, people
always make more of such things than really exists, and the true
Kennedy haters just won't let go of it."

More typical were earlier Times pieces headlined "Wielding the
Kennedy Name for the Good of His Party" and "Kennedy With Oomph (and
Moneybags) Is Patrick." A 2000 Los Angeles Times piece on Kennedy's
money-raising prowess said he can be a "hothead" who "almost came to
blows" with a Republican lawmaker. The Washington Post covered a
couple of the incidents as gossip items and ran such short news
stories as "Rep. Kennedy Hopes to Quit House Fundraising Post."

Kennedy has gotten rougher treatment in his home region, where Boston
Herald columnist Howie Carr last week called him "generally dumber
than two rocks."

It's difficult not to feel sympathy for Kennedy, who grew up in a
relentlessly scrutinized family in which two of his uncles were
murdered. But soft-focus media coverage has given him plenty of
chances, far more than would be accorded a run-of-the-mill
congressman with his history of self-inflicted wounds.

Thanks to his Capitol fender-bender, however, that is likely to change.

Are stumbling presidents just plain funny?

Does sinking in the polls produce a rising tide of ridicule?

Do millionaire comedians like kickin' 'em when they're down?

You bet. The number of late-night jokes about George W. Bush has more
than doubled this year -- with almost a third of them mocking his
intelligence, followed by his declining popularity, his personality,
the Dubai ports deal and the war in Iraq.

Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O'Brien averaged 45 Bush jokes a
month last year, says the Center for Media and Public Affairs. But
for the first three months of this year, they have popped the
president 102 times a month.

Leno: "The president does not like change in personnel. He likes to
keep the same people. I think he got this from having the same
third-grade teacher year after year."

Letterman: "According to a recent poll, three out of five Americans
believe George W. Bush should be impeached. And when he heard that,
the president said, 'Cool, I love peaches.' "

O'Brien: "In a speech yesterday -- this is true -- President Bush
told the Iraqi people to, this is a quote, 'Get governing.' Then, the
president introduced his new speechwriter, Larry the Cable Guy."

The ridicule factor is a pretty decent political barometer. In 1998,
the number of late-night jokes about Bill Clinton more than doubled
-- to more than 140 a month -- as the Lewinsky affair launched
endless punch lines about the president as horndog. In Bush's case,
his rocky performance has revived the old stereotype of W. as dim
bulb, or perhaps made it safer to skewer the president than, say, in
the sober aftermath of 9/11.

The importance of humor was underscored in heavy-breathing fashion
after Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House
Correspondents' Association Dinner. Some C-SPAN viewers liked his
routine, and others -- including most of the media gang in attendance
-- did not.

Many liberal bloggers were quick to denounce the mainstream media for
not showering the Comedy Central host with publicity and praise. The
reason, said these bloggers, was that Colbert had skewered Bush in a
way that embarrassed the timid White House press corps.

"Colbert's was a brave and shocking performance," writes Chris Durang
in the Huffington Post. "And for the media to pretend it isn't
newsworthy is . . . a symbol of how shoddy and suspect the media is."
Salon Editor Joan Walsh says "Colbert's deadly performance . . .
exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion" with the administration.

Really? Or are left-wingers just so mad at the media for not
denouncing Bush daily that they prefer the zingers of a fake anchor?

Colbert did take some swipes at the president in the guise of the
blowhard pundit he plays on TV. ("You know where he stands. He
believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no
matter what happened Tuesday.") But it was hardly the stinging
denunciation being cheered on by his liberal fans. In fact, Colbert
was just as dismissive in what he described as his "contempt" for the
black-tie crowd of Washington journalists. ("Over the last five years
you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the
effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you
had the courtesy not to try to find out.")

Humor often cuts in a way that journalism doesn't, which is why
Bush's late-night drubbing is serious business. Bush's detractors are
convinced that Colbert drew blood, and maybe journalists were
unenthusiastic because they got scratched in the process. But the
jokes wouldn't resonate if much of the country wasn't already unhappy
with the president.

The stock market dropped last Monday, thanks to Maria Bartiromo.

The CNBC anchor reported that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke
believed that his recent congressional testimony had been
misinterpreted and that his agency might not be done raising interest
rates after all, depending on future economic developments. And how
did Bartiromo know this? Bernanke told her at the White House
Correspondents' dinner.

"What am I going to do, walk away?" Bartiromo said the next day on CNBC.

Bernanke "never said it was off the record," network spokesman Kevin
Goldman says. "She didn't agree to any conditions." Still, the Fed
chief will probably curtail his dinner-party chatter.

Another journalist has blogged her way into oblivion. Gina Vivinetto,
music critic for the free tabloid published by the St. Petersburg
Times, resigned after acknowledging that she had created a fake
personal page on MySpace.com. Times Executive Editor Neil Brown told
the Tampa Tribune that Vivinetto used the bogus page to post mocking
comments of "a somewhat sexual nature" about a county commissioner.

By the way, I've gotten a ton of e-mail about my piece on New Orleans
yesterday and the media coverage of what remains a devastated area.
My thanks to everyone who took the trouble to write.

The Boston Globe has a damage assessment on Kennedy's problems:

"Kennedy's return to rehab after a car accident under shadowy
circumstances seemed to some political analysts to be a benchmark --
the moment even some supporters wondered whether he would ever fully
outrun his demons." Still, "analysts say Rhode Islanders are likely
to reelect Kennedy, who has won the loyalty of constituents by
bringing federal dollars home to the nation's smallest state."

The Chicago Tribune sees the GOP on the defensive:

"Six months before Election Day, with control of Congress potentially
teetering in the balance, Republicans across the country are beset by
anxieties about the fortunes of their party and fearful that their
dominance could be upended by an electorate hungry for a change.

"The alarms, which have been sounding for months, are increasing in
volume as the summer nears with feelings of discontent over the price
of gasoline, the war in Iraq and illegal immigration. Though
Democrats have yet to settle on solutions to those issues or a
unified message for the fall, Republicans worry that many voters
simply will be looking for a fresh start."

The New York Daily News really overreaches in this CIA piece:

"CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly resigned yesterday amid
allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker
parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman."

May have attended? The same story acknowledges: "Intelligence and law
enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss
also went to the parties."

Dick Polman does a little reality check on Rummy:

"The Orwellian master is still Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld. On
Thursday, he was ambushed in Atlanta by questioner Ray McGovern, who
happened to be a retired CIA official who provided President Reagan
with daily intelligence briefings. McGovern rebuked Rumsfeld for
falsely claiming, during the early weeks of the war, that weapons of
mass destruction had been located.

"McGovern: 'You said you knew where they were.'

"Rumsfeld: 'I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were.'

"Memo to the Records Department: Call up all previous Rumsfeld
statements and insert the words 'suspect sites.' Too late. We already
have the transcript of Rumsfeld on ABC. March 30, 2003.

"Question to Rumsfeld: 'Is it curious to you that (troops) haven't
found any weapons of mass destruction?' Rumsfeld: 'We know where they
are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west,
south and north somewhat.'

"Another technique in '1984' was to simply dump inconvenient facts
down the 'memory hole.' Rumsfeld has tried that numerous times
already. One of my favorites: On Feb. 20, 2003, during the runup to
war, he told PBS that the Americans 'would be welcomed,' a scene akin
to Afghanistan, where people were 'playing music, cheering, flying
kites.' Seven months later, when a broadcast journalist read the PBS
remarks back to Rumsfeld, the Defense secretary replied: 'Never said
that. Never did...You're thinking of somebody else.'

"Could these myriad attempts to rewrite history have anything to do
with the latest poll findings, which show that even 45 percent of
self-identified conservatives are now voicing disapproval of the president?"

But Gateway Pundit does his own fact-checking on the Atlanta incident:

"Ray McGovern, the man who heckled Rummy on Thursday, has a trail of
lunatic behavior a mile long . . . But, to the mainstream media, he's
just your average 'retired CIA analyst!'...

"In June of 2005, Ray McGovern blamed Zionists for starting the War in Iraq:

"The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former
intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in
Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration
'neocons' so 'the United States and Israel could dominate that part
of the world.' He said that Israel should not be considered an ally
and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon. 'Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite
conversation,' McGovern said. 'The last time I did this, the previous
director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.'"

Those quotes, by the way, are from a WashPost piece last year, so not
everyone is treating McGovern as your average ex-analyst.

"Thank God that 'Jews feel Democrats fundamentally believe it is
important to make sure that American Jews feel comfortable being
American Jews,' or, that accusation by Ray McGovern would sound
horribly anti-Semitic."

The New Republic's Ryan Lizza has been reporting how one likely
presidential candidate has been wrapping himself in the flag--but
what many people will consider the wrong flag:

"It's hard to make out, because the video is fuzzy. The copy I
obtained was originally recorded off a television using VHS in 1993
and then transferred to a second tape, further degrading the quality.
But, once you know what it is, it makes sense. It sits folded on a
bookcase of trophies and bric-a-brac behind George Allen, who is
seated at a desk in his home office. It's right there next to the fax
machine. You can see the red field. You can make out the diagonal
blue bar. And you can see what looks like a white star. It is the
Confederate flag, and it appears in the very first ad that Allen
broadcast in 1993, when he ran for governor . . .

"Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where's Waldo, with
the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character.
First, as The New Republic reported last week, there's the senior
class photo from Palos Verdes High School with Allen wearing a
Confederate flag pin. Now we learn that the Confederate flag appears
as a decoration in Allen's first statewide ad, even though he has
long maintained that the flag did not adorn his home after 1992.

"Some conservatives have recently argued that the revelations about
Allen's high school photo are irrelevant because the picture is so
old. '[I]f we're going to scrutinize people's high school records as
we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run,' columnist
Kathleen Parker wrote last week. But, as revealed by the 1993
campaign ad--as well as the accounts of Allen associates now stepping
forward--his embrace of the Confederate flag is even more extensive
than tnr previously reported. According to his colleagues,
classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the
flag--on himself, his car, inside his home--or expressed his
enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000."

Of course, that could be a plus in the South.