Scrapbook

...But Gore, the master of many policy details, mangled the facts, and late last week his aides could not say with certainty that Shiloh or Margaret Ann Aitcheson actually takes the brand-name drug, Lodine, that Gore said they do...

...Game, set, match...

...The offending ad featured dishy Olympic distance runner Suzy Favor Hamilton as a classic B-movie scream queen, being pursued by a chainsawwielding maniac in a hockey mask...

...Karen P. Hughes, Mr...

...It's hard to feel bad for Nike in all of this...

...Gore's assertions that his mother-in-law paid nearly three times as much for the same arthritis medicine that was used by his ailing dog Shiloh...

...Kym Spell, a spokeswoman for Mr...

...As Mickey Kaus joked the next day in Kausfiles.com, Robinson "must have misplaced his orders from Media Central: He's still busting Gore for stretching the truth...

...NBC claims to have received "thousands" of complaints...

...As Robinson went on to explain, Gore, "who has a history of embellishing facts about himself and his family," had lifted the figures and the comparison from a study done by House Democrats...

...There's only so much silliness we can record on these two pages...

...22, Robinson highlighted the Gore campaign's failed efforts to flee the scene of the anecdote...

...markets (PNTR...

...Kyl, and thank goodness this didn't require a floor vote and debate...

...Rather than follow up on a story unflattering to Gore from its sister paper (the Globe is owned by the New York Times company), the Times transformed Mother-in-Law-gate into yet another sermon about nasty Republicans...

...policy to insist China and Taiwan become members at the same time...

...Gore, called the Bush campaign's focus on the article 'the latest sign the Bush-Cheney ticket is very, very desperate.' And she said the campaign had verified that both Mr...

...It's an obvious spoof...

...To the best of The Scrapbook's knowledge, no women have ever been pursued, much less killed, by chainsaw-wielding men in hockey masks...

...The Nike Chainsaw Massacre In the middle of its Olympics ratings fiasco last week, NBC at least got some free publicity by pulling a Nike ad they had run for the first few days of the games...

...Even the House Democratic study, from which Gore lifted manufacturer wholesale prices and presented them as his family's own retail cost, notes that just eight of the 200 best-selling drugs in the United States can be used for both humans and animals...

...With the House having already approved the measure, the way is now clear for China to become a member of the World Trade Organization...

...Gore's mother-in-law and dog had used the same drug...

...Not to mention, had the amount of the drug implied by Gore's figures actually been administered to the dog, the animal might have been poisoned...

...The reaction from the cranky fringe was swift...

...The Jason/Leather-face knockoff chases Hamilton into the woods, but in her fabulous Nikes, she leaves him gasping for breath...

...Plus, the generic version of the drug used by 85 percent of patients turns out to be cheaper than the doggie version...

...Those numbers suggest that comparing human and animal drug costs to underscore the high cost of prescription drugs, as Gore has done, is irrelevant except for a tiny fraction of the drugs that are prescribed...

...Bush's communications director, distributed an article from the Boston Globe that challenged Mr...

...The day after the first Globe story, the Times took dictation from the Gore campaign: "Dick Cheney and his aides continued efforts today to hammer away at Mr...

...Among the "highlights" of the week-long debate in the world's greatest deliberative body were the suggestion made by the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that opposition to PNTR was part and parcel of America's long-lived "racial antagonism" toward all things Chinese and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm's bold prediction that once the folks of China "know the joy of wearing cotton underwear made out of Texas and American cotton," there will be no holding back their demands for political and religious freedom...

...Gore's credibility...

...Its story the next day was headlined: "In Harshest Attack Yet, Cheney Accuses Gore of Fabrications...

...Nevertheless, and despite the lopsided outcome, the debate was not a total loss...

...Louis described the ad as "truly disgusting and misogy-nistic" and accused Nike of perpetuating "women as victims of violence...

...Spoofs, even clever ones, being a minority taste, The Scrapbook is willing to concede that Nike's judgment may have been less than optimal in choosing to run the ad during prime-time coverage of the Olympics, which have in recent decades been transformed into a quasi-religious spectacle, which must not be mocked...

...Scrapbook A Footnote to Mother-in-Law-gate Before the phony pet dog/Mother-in-Law anecdote enters the pantheon of Al Gore whoppers, it's worth giving proper credit to Walter V. Robinson, who first reported it in the Sept...

...Even ostensibly sane people found fault...

...The Washington Post's editorial page said that while the ad may seem funny to the slick (presumably male) execs in Beaverton, "it's not a funny subject, surely not to women who have been or are frightened of becoming victims...

...Neither were any of the sequels...

...Another Nike ad run during the Olympics showed a boy on a skateboard fleeing a sword-swinging gladiator who tries, repeatedly, to decapitate him...

...18 Boston Globe...

...Now, the reason the origins of the story are worth insisting on is not just that Robinson deserves full credit for his scoop, but the astonishing twist given to it by the New York Times, where the orders from Media Central are still very much enforced...

...So a tip of the hat to Sen...

...But still, we feel a collegial duty to point out a couple of things to all the editorialists who swallowed too many solemnity vitamins with their Wheaties last week...

...The Underwear Case for Trade with China On Tuesday of last week, the Senate voted 85-15 to approve China's permanent low-tariff access to U.S...

...This commercial is also spoofing a movie, Gladiator...

...Maybe it isn't so bad that Nike is getting a taste of its own gender demagoguery...

...Thus far, however, there have been no complaints about this ad...

...And the lede read as follows: "The Republicans continued a sharp assault yesterday on Vice President Al Gore over the veracity of a statement he made last month [about the arthritis drug...

...In a follow-up story on Sept...

...Gladiators were once real, and many men were at one time decapitated by them...

...In the face of Beijing's continuing insistence that Taiwan be allowed to join the WTO only as a territory of the mainland, Jon Kyl's threat to offer an amendment to the bill to guarantee Taiwan's admission as a separate entity pried from President Clinton a pledge not to cave in to Beijing's demands and a reaffirmation that it is U.S...

...Letter-to-the-editor types in Washington and St...

...If the Gore campaign says it has verified something, that apparently is good enough for the Times, which proceeded the following day to do some hammering away of its own, again on the theme of GOP aggression...

...Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were not documentaries...

...Ads this winter in the now-defunct "Ms...

...Well, "mangled the facts" was putting it politely...

...Jones" series featured sprinter Marion Jones crusading for equal pay for male and female athletes, presumably in part to deflect attention from the low wage scale in Nike's third world factories...

...Robinson's piece was a model of thoroughness: "Vice President Al Gore," he began, "reaching for a personal example to illustrate the breathtaking costs of some prescription drugs, told seniors in Florida last month that his mother-in-law pays nearly three times as much for the same arthritis medicine used for his ailing dog, Shiloh...

...The super-PC company has long put itself at the service of feminist agitators...

...So in just 48 hours, the story had changed from Gore's pathological fantasizing to an alleged Bush-Cheney "assault," which has to be a new record, even for the Times...