Adam Nagourney has written an "analysis" of the ... well, he calls it a "sharp dispute" between Barack Obama and Howard Dean. I hope the president is on the beach without his laptop or other access to the Times. Howard Dean has enough of a sense of humor to give this kind of crap a miss.
It's not that the disagreement doesn't exist. It's just that certain words and phrases used by both media and politicos now are red flags shouting, "We can't figure this out and we don't know how to dig our way out of Washington-speak. So let's just grab a headline instead."
Here we are in the final hours of the worst and most humiliating decade for America that most of us have experienced. Even as we should be emerging from its thrall we continue to be tugged back by Washington-speak -- including Washington's journos who use words and phrases so old and smelly they must have already been dead for at least half a decade.
Examples: "battle an entrenched establishment"; "Mr. Dean denounced it as a sell-out while Mr. Obama heralded it as an historic breakthrough"; "the roots of the ideological breach"; "this White House, stocked as it is with insiders"; "who has long had strained relations"; "entrenched special interests"; "long-time feud"; "whip up the public"; "come under fire on a number of fronts"; "enlist his network of grass-root supporters"; "consequences for the 2010 elections"; "stinging attack"; "focus on what this bill is and not what it isn’t"; "what an enormous landmark achievement it is, progressive achievement".
Mind you, not all of these were the words of Adam Nagourney. Some cliches came from the mouths of familiar Washington babes, including "progressives."
Is there such a thing as progress when every aspect of it is defined by weary pundits, dead phrases, and media drum beaters? Or, to put it another way, we know we can't trust the media, but can we entrust progress to progressives?
