The Cheney thing continues – although for me, the story is the reaction to the story. As today’s NY Times and the Washington Post notes, the two parties are getting real nasty. The Democrats, via Senate minority leader, Daschle, was calling for unity and peace and all that, and various Republicans went with Cheney that Senator Leahy asked for the profanity. Despite Daschle’s (well, more or less) asking whether we can all get along, according to the NY Times article:
Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, said, “I definitely think it’s needed.” But, he added, “I think the Democrats are greatly responsible.”
Bob Stevenson, a spokesman for Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said of Mr. Daschle: “He can talk the talk. The question is, Can he walk the walk?”
Umm. What? I thought Frist wanted to get the folks of Congress to get along too; but how can one expect to get along if one person curses the other out, and then calls for unity get laughed at? What? Am I missing something?
Oh, and there’s the Slate.com article trying to explain why, oh why, did the Washington Post put in the F-word (nicely spelled out), while the NY Times (in today’s article anyway) went coy. Acknowledging that the NY Times’ coverage had left out “the fact that what the vice president thought Mr. Leahy should do was anatomically improbable,” latest Slate.com Explainer observes:
Editors weigh the newsworthiness of the event in question against concerns about community standards. Readers can be just as distracted when a newspaper clumsily sidesteps profanity as when a paper uses it; it’s up to the editor to decide whether the journalistic purpose of the story is best served by bluntness or decorum.
Ah, a Slate.com article that mixes bluntess and explanation and a reference to a Supreme Court case. Cool.
I better stop it with this particular news stuff; if I’m more worried about profanity in Congress rather than about the rest of the world stage, boy, what does that say about me??? 😉
I will eventually read the commentary on the Supreme Court’s end-of-term decisions on Slate.com; Dahlia Lithwick and ex-solicitor general Walter Dellinger are good reads with their running conversation (not the resigning Theodore Olsen, who’s moving on with his life after three years with the administration; oh, and sorry, Dellinger’s a former Acting Solicitor General – as if that makes that much of a difference).
Mets v. Yanks on. Play ball.