When You Got Nothin', Bash Gore.

Today's post from Redstate regular "Erick" is almost beneath notice. Lacking anything of substance to say, he resorts to calling names: Sissy. Girly-man.

This half-hearted hectoring would be entirely forgettable except for one thing. Mr. Erick leads off by trotting out an old lie from the 2000 campaign:

"Remember Algore hiring Naomi Wolf to show him how to be a man, instead of a she-man?"

Oh boy. There they go again. When all else fails, if there's nothing else to write about, repeat some favorite well-worn lies about Al Gore. The charge that Mr. Gore hired Naomi Wolf "to teach him how to be a man" is a slander that sprang from the pen of Time's Michael Duffy in 1999.

It was, like so many other tales bruited about by the press corp during the campaign, invented.

The truth of the Naomi Wolf saga is easy to find. Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has meticulously documented the genesis of this and many other Gore-bashing legends. There are two major tales that make up the "hired a woman to teach him how to be a man" lie--the "alpha male" invention and the "earth tones" groaner. Here's just a taste of Somerby's reporting on the "earth tones" flap:

Let’s go back and review the way this iconic claim unfolded.

As noted, Michael Duffy’s story in Time didn’t mention “earth tones” (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/4/03). According to Duffy, one unnamed Gore adviser had “downplayed” Wolf as a “wardrobe consultant.” But Duffy stressed the fact that most Gore advisers didn’t know what Wolf was doing for the campaign. (Wolf lived in New York, where she worked with Gore’s daughter; the Gore camp was based in DC and then Nashville.) Simply put, there was no way to tell from Duffy’s piece if Wolf had ever consulted on wardrobe. But Duffy didn’t say a word about “earth tones.” There’s no sign that anyone ever told Duffy that Wolf told Gore to wear tones.

But earth tones popped up one day later, offered as a “speculation” in a piece by—who else?—Ceci Connolly. One day after Duffy’s piece appeared, the Gore-bashing spinner wrote a page-one piece about Wolf in the Washington Post. She spoke with former Clinton aide Dick Morris, who had worked with Wolf in the’96 campaign (later praising Wolf for her mainstream advice). Here’s the sentence in which “earth tones” got its start:

CONNOLLY (11/1/99): Morris speculated that Wolf, who has long contended that earth tones are more “reassuring” to audiences, is the person behind Gore’s recent wardrobe change.

That’s the sentence in which Naomi Wolf told Gore to wear earth tones was born.? It was born in a “speculation” by Morris, offered to the egregious Ceci Connolly.

The whole business about "earth tones" began as rank speculation by Dick Morris, a former Clinton advisor who had himself hired Ms. Wolf for advice. But by Campaign 2000, Mr. Morris had a fat contract offering his observations on cable "news" channels and no tale was too ridiculous to tell, at least not when it was about Mr. Gore (or "Algore" as Mr. Erick writes, unmistakably revealing his Dittohead colors).

On a day when there's not a new sensation to occupy Redstate's lesser lights, the old tales still serve well.