The media murdered Dan Quayle's career.

        Caught flatfooted by President Bush's surprise choice of a vice president in 1988, Big Media decided that anyone unknown to the New York know-it-alls must be a nitwit nobody from nowhere — and they set out to prove it.

        Maybe the senator from Indiana was a helium-head. Or maybe he had great potential. We'll never know, because he was tormented beyond recognition on the press playground. By the time I met him at the GOP convention in 1996, he had the hunted, darting eyes of a wanted felon at a Policemen's Ball. Every word was hesitant, almost stuttered, as if he had been told his media Miranda rights: “Everything you say can and will be used against you to make you look like a slobbering idiot.”

        So, like a man on a narrow window ledge who can't help looking down, he stumbled and fell, and the twisting, helpless free fall was replayed in slow motion.
       

Quayle stumbles

        “What a waste it is to lose one's mind,” he said.

        “If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

        And, “Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.”

        Liberals were ecstatic. Editors who mangle headlines every day laughed so hard they nearly popped buttons on their stuffed shirts. The intellectual elite had its whipping boy.

        But while they were har-har-ing, the vice president also said things that were courageous and true.

        Ten years ago, he warned that TV shows were polluting our culture by glorifying single-parent families.

        “It doesn't help matters,” he said in a speech in May 1992, “when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another "lifestyle choice.'”

        Hollywood yowled like a cat in a Maytag. They accused him of censoring artistic sitcom expression — imagine where we'd be today without masterpieces like Married ... With Children. They ridiculed him as a hopeless square.
       

Murphy confesses

        So who's laughing now?

        Not Murphy Brown. In an interview in 1998 that received very little national attention (surprise), Candice Bergen admitted that Mr. Quayle's speech on family values was “the right theme to hammer home.

        “I agreed with all of it except his references to the show,” she said. “The body of the speech was completely sound.”

        The Atlantic Monthly reported in 1993 that divorce and cohabitation were out of control. “Dan Quayle was Right,” the headline said. After years of feminist dogma, what a revelation: Single-parent families are not something to celebrate.

        It was head-slap obvious to most of us. And now, 10 years later, so is the damage to children without fathers — increased alcohol abuse, drug addiction, promiscuity, poverty and a chronic cycle of divorce.

        This is where we wind up in a world of Murphy Browns and their me-first “lifestyle choices.”

        I was raised by a valiant divorced mother. In those days, they called families like ours a “broken home.”

        Now they call it “normal.”

        Children of divorce know they had it right the first time. And so did Dan Quayle.

        Contact Peter Bronson at 768-8301; e-mail: pbronson@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Bronson.

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