The Liberal Media Circles The Wagons Around Wendy Davis

It has not taken long for the heart of the liberal media machine to take up the defense of Wendy Davis, the Democrat running for governor of Texas whose self-proclaimed life story was exposed as mostly a lie by the Dallas press.  A great example of this effort is the column by Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg in which she proclaims the "essential truthiness" of Davis' story.  I laughed when I read that phrase.  Davis lied, Margaret Carlson knows that, so instead of arguing that what Davis said was true, we are told that it had "essential truthiness".  Just think when the last time you heard a political tale described as having "essential truthiness".  If you are like me, you cannot remember anyone ever using that bizarre formulation previous to today.  It is possible that Carlson wrote that Obama's promise that if you like your plan, you can keep it and called that a promise of "essential truthiness", but if so, I cannot find that.

Carlson focuses on some of the minor points in the Dallas Morning News story about Davis.  She argues that it is no big deal whether or not Davis was divorced at 19 (as she says) or at 21 (as the record shows).  This distinction is supposed to show that the complaints are nothing but minor nit-picking by (of course) evil Republicans.  Of course, this misses the main point.  Davis claimed that she was a single mother who struggled mightily to take care of her family while working multiple jobs to pay her way through college and Harvard Law School.  As Davis tells the tale, her life has been a triumph of hard work and tenacity, of overcoming adversity, and of constant struggle. The reality, as now uncovered, is quite different.  In her early 20s, Davis remarried to a man much older than her.  He, not she, paid for her college tuition.  When Davis went to law school in Massachusetts, he, not she, took care of the two children who stayed with him in Texas.  He, not she, cashed in his retirement savings to pay for her law school.  He took out large loans to cover the cost of law school (Harvard is extremely expensive).  When he made the last payment for law school costs, she left him on the next day, THE NEXT DAY.  Then, after leaving her husband, Davis gave up custody of the two kids to him.  One of those two kids was the child she had with her first husband, but the second husband ended up with custody.  In short, Davis was not a struggling single mother who overcame adversity through hard work; she was a self-centered gold digger who found and older sugar daddy to take care of her kids, to pay for her education, and to take custody of those inconvenient children when she wanted to go off and make a name for herself.  Instead of "essential truthiness", Carlson should have pointed out the "essential immorality" or the "essential self-importance" or the "essential dishonesty" of the Davis story.

The Davis tale is going to be a problem for the liberal media.  This is not a complicated discussion of health insurance where false lines can confuse the public.  People understand a pretty young woman who uses her looks to get an older man to support her.  People understand what it means for a mother to willingly give up her children so that she can go off to a flashier life unfettered by kids.  People understand the difference between "essential truthiness" and a total distortion and lie.