The world’s most boring cover-up is also the slowest to unravel
Lipscomb in E&P:
Michael Kranish, the Globe reporter who wrote the front page story about receiving Kerry’s “complete medical and military records,” was not happy at being pursued by my questions about how he had made that determination. Kranish finally sent me the following: “The story speaks for itself. Other media have been given access to the same records, and the Kerry office has said it is accepting requests. Your request should go to them. That is our statement.” It sounds more like a response from a lawyer than a reporter.
We’ve said that this is the most boring cover-up in history — the idea that this was all about Kerry’s grades is a joke, but whatever is really being covered-up may well be nearly as boring. The cover-up is the slowest to unravel as well. After all, the underlying events occurred more than three decades ago, and the saga of the 180 itself is a couple of years old at this point.
This space does not think well of Michael Kranish. We think he did a hit piece on George Elliott at the beginning of SwiftBoatVets, a misleading article called Veteran retracts criticism of Kerry, which we found grave fault with, and the O’Neill group debunked. We attempted to do a detailed exegesis of Kranish’s previous writings on Kerry to show what we view as unethical interviewing of Elliott in order to elicit a damaging quote: we think we succeeded. Therefore, we are not surprised that Kerry biographer and admirer Kranish appears to be assisting the Senator in slowing down the disclosure of whatever nasties remain concealed in the remaining hundred pages of documents still unreleased via Form 180.
Stay tuned: at the pace this is proceeding, the denouement will not occur until January/February 2008, via, perhaps, a former First Lady.