The latest issue of the Weekly Standard has an article by the “humorist” P.J. O’Rourke that begins “John Kerry effectively ended his political career on February 28, 2005…” That’s a big claim, but O’Rourke doesn’t back it up. Here’s his account of the allegedly unforgiveable comments Kerry made during a discussion of the 2004 campaign:

Addressing the audience of tame Democrats, Kerry explained his defeat. “There has
been,” he said, “a profound and negative change in the relationship of America’s media with the American people. . . . If 77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on Election Day believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq–as they did–and 77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11–as they did–then something has happened in the way in which we are talking to each other and who is arbitrating the truth in American politics. . . . When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem.”

America is not doctrinaire. It’s hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable. Henry Wallace never quite managed, or George Wallace either. But Kerry’s done it. American free speech needs to be submitted to arbitration because Americans aren’t smart enough to have a First Amendment, and you can tell this is so, because Americans weren’t smart enough to vote for John Kerry.

“We learned,” Kerry continued, “that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there’s a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Kerry is hilariously bad as a demagogue. A low subculture and its inferior sub-media are thwarting the will of the sacred mainstream? His small sparks of malice were blurred by vast, damp clouds of Kerry-fog–murky budget critiques, hazy pronouncements on Social Security and health care, foreign policy vaporings, leaden anecdotes, and an obscure protest that 45 percent of West Virginians lack sewer hook-ups…

First of all, what’s “unforgiveable” about pointing out the obvious fact that the media has failed to clarify, and in some cases disseminated, a lot of misinformation over the past five years? (Much of it, of course, originated with the Bush administration — I co-wrote a whole book about this — though Kerry spread some myths of his own.) That is undeniable. Yet O’Rourke glosses right over the fact that millions of Americans falsely believed that WMDs had been found in Iraq, and instead pretends that John Kerry wants to appoint an “arbitrator” to regulate political discourse.

I don’t believe that there’s a regulatory solution to this problem — Kerry mentions the Fairness Doctrine, but as he points out, it’s not coming back (nor is it clear that it should). Still, we have to talk about this issue as a society. Democratic debate works best when both sides are arguing their cases from a common set of facts. If millions of voters base their decisions on bad information — and the media doesn’t help them realize their error — then we have a problem. While Kerry is not the ideal messenger for this issue, what he said is not crackpot demagoguery.