Naturally Republican. Pondering the Bolton nomination yesterday, I passed my eyes over Sheryl Gay Stolberg's article for the Times on Monday's failed cloture vote ("Democrats Block a Vote on Bolton for the Second Time"). Stolberg is one of the duller and more reflexively Republican of the Times' Washington-bureau pack: a reporter for whom, like far too many of her colleagues, Republicanism simply and completely defines the political norm. Republican assertion is presumed to be honest; Republican rhetoric is the natural language of politics. Republican narratives are the standard against which Democratic actions are evaluated. It's pervasive in what Stolberg writes, so pervasive that I suspect she doesn't even notice (nor would care if it were pointed out) how thoroughly mind-melded she is with the powers that be.

It'd be far more effort than it's worth to unpack all the manifold distortions and inadequacies of Stolberg's piece; hold it up against the parallel WaPo effort if you want to see the difference between the Times piece and a mainstream article that actually tries to play it straight. For Stolberg, pretty much all you need to know to know that the rhetorical fix is in is in the first couple of grafs:

The final tally was 54 to 38, six votes short of the 60 required to break a filibuster, the parliamentary tactic that Democrats have used to forestall a final vote on the confirmation.

The vote, a setback for both President Bush and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, came after the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., made a fruitless attempt to negotiate an end to the impasse with one of Mr. Bolton's chief Democratic opponents, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. ...

The next move, then, is up to the president, who must decide whether to use his constitutional authority to put Mr. Bolton in the ambassador's job when Congress takes a vacation, perhaps as early as the July 4 break.

Is there any question in this as to which side the honest brokers come from? It's no accident at all that Stolberg concludes her piece with a quote from Bill Frist complaining about the minority's resort to "parliamentary maneuvers to thwart the President's choice": Frist's language is uncomplicatedly her own. What other language would a Washington apparatchik think to adopt, after all? And if that language forwards a narrative of Democratic illegitimacy, well, that's just the breaks of the game. But I have to give Stolberg points for the phrase "constitutional authority," nicely echoing as it does the GOP-confected "constitutional option" that the filibuster debate treated us to: rather than risk finding herself left behind in the terminology battles, Stolberg leaps pre-emptively to the sanitizing rhetoric we'll no doubt be treated to should Bolton in fact be given that recess appointment.

But all this is par for the course. What really caught me was this passage at the end of the article, which (of course) gives pride of place to another unanswered litany of Republican complaints about bad Democratic manners.

After the vote, Republicans complained bitterly that Democrats were "on a fishing expedition," in the words of Mr. Allen, a leading backer of Mr. Bolton. Mr. Frist has said repeatedly that Democrats keep changing their demands; other Republicans, including the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, are now adopting his language.

"We have worked in good faith, yet Democratic leaders continue to move the goal posts," Mr. McClellan said after the vote on Monday night. "They are not interested in documents, they are only interested in preventing progress and blocking John Bolton."

Stolberg retails this "moving the goalposts" rhetoric without the slightest concern for telling her readers what, in fact, it might actually mean in the history of the Bolton tussle—much less whether it's a fair charge or even manages to correspond minimally to reality. (Naturally, it doesn't: Senate Democrats have been trying since the nomination fight started to get full disclosure of the contentious NSA intercepts—presumably the demand behind the "moving goalposts" talk—and have been insisting for weeks now that they regard disclosure as a requirement and a matter of Senate privilege in the exercise of its advise-and-consent role.) Stolberg doesn't care about any of that, which us naive non-journalists might think is a crucial part of the work of reporting. No, for her she is reporting, and reporting the only thing that really matters: Republicans have picked up a new talking point!

Spend a little time wrapping your mind around that one. Sheryl Gay Stolberg thinks that the mere fact of Republicans adopting a language in a political fight is news—and that mention of it is self-justifying, and requires nothing by way of evaluation or even contextualizing. It doesn't seem even to have entered Stolberg's mind (what there is of it) that statements like Frist's and McClellan's might have some determinable degree of truth or falsehood in them. What can this mean, except that for Stolberg Republican language has been so thoroughly naturalized that it's like nothing so much as a feature of the landscape: that it isn't really language at all?

posted by michael  2:31:56 PM  
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