Eight Feet Deep

It’s funny — not in the “ha-ha” way but in the sad way — how it takes total dev­as­ta­tion and thou­sands of lives to knock a stu­pid, noth­ing story off the front page and off cable news.

But that is just what the tragic and ultra-destructive earth­quake in Haiti did to “Negro­gate,” the furor over the slip of the tongue among friends that was never meant as a malig­nant com­ment. Look even on the Web page of the most polit­i­cally polar­iz­ing cable news net­work, Fox, and you don’t see any­thing about Harry Reid on the main page — or at least I didn’t this after­noon. There are hardly any polit­i­cal sto­ries on there at all. It’s all Haiti, where it right­fully should be.

The all-Harry-Reid-beating-all-the-time has stopped, for now. That is even though the stu­pid­ity of “the mes­sage” has become all pol­i­tics. It has to have polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion or it is not on cable news, at least. But such stu­pid sto­ries haven’t always been lim­ited to party pol­i­tics. Remem­ber Chan­dra Levy?

I have men­tioned here before but I think it is worth men­tion­ing again the worst “sort-of-true” pre­dic­tion I ever made.

In August 2001, when Gee Dubya was out cut­ting brush all day on the Craw­ford ranch, not much was in the news. That is except for the Chan­dra Levy-Gary Con­dit story.

Dur­ing that time I was sit­ting in a hold­ing room at an air­port in Waco await­ing Air Force One’s arrival. I for­get the occa­sion. I was among a group of reporters and news pho­tog­ra­phers who were wait­ing to be screened, mostly for the photographer’s cam­era equip­ment, by the Secret Ser­vice and the then ATF. Our con­ver­sa­tions ended up on the Chandra-gate, I mean no dis­re­spect to the mur­dered woman, but the story did not merit the media’s shock and awe it was given.

One news pho­tog­ra­pher, pre­dictably from CNN, said he thought the Levy story was a great one. I said I thought it was a dud, but I added, “It will prob­a­bly stay as the lead until some­one crashes an air­liner into the Empire State Building.”

We were just jour­nal­ists talk­ing. We engaged in gal­lows humor and idiocy because of what we’ve expe­ri­enced or because we were just a bunch of geeks. Never did I ever imag­ine some­thing sim­i­lar as I pre­dicted would hap­pen in less than a month. I really did feel bad about mak­ing that com­ment after 9/11.

In real­ity, the Harry Reid story is even less com­pelling, and cer­tainly even less dra­matic and inter­est­ing than the Levy story. Reid was being just like I was among those geeks in Waco. He didn’t mean any­thing by it. But for good mea­sure and the sake of the black vote, Reed apol­o­gized and Pres­i­dent Obama said “de nada.”

The seman­tics of the Sen­ate Major­ity Leader’s ver­bal faux pas — sorry I didn’t mean to have to chi-chi for­eign words so close together — are about the only thing inter­est­ing in this whole mess. It’s not like Reid used the “N” word, or as the lit­tle ol’ white ladies I grew up around used to say politely, “Nigra.” He didn’t even say “col­ored.” If some blacks are offended, I’m sorry. But if they are, I think they could more con­struc­tively put that upset toward being used by the Repub­li­cans to  put one more hole in the Democ­rats’ big tent.

I am no Harry Reid fan. Ditto for Nancy Pelosi. I would rather see decent Democ­rats elected than both of those what­ev­ers. But some­times I just wish stu­pid­ity could be abol­ished, at least just for a lit­tle while. Maybe it can be put aside to help some folks, mostly “of color,” who are hurt­ing really bad in Haiti.