Saturday, November 18, 2006

Good Mememanship

The conventional wisdon pouring like putrid fermented human bodily fluids from the mouths of the noise machine has it that "the Democrats are divided." It has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? And at first glance, since the Democratic house members have recently held an election, it might make sense, as in "the world is definitely flat" makes sense on primitive observation.

But let us examine the numbers.

Pelosi was elected unanimously. Steny Hoyer drew a 149 to 86 count to achieve the 2nd spot in the House. A little short of a 2/3rds majority, that.

Contrast this to the contentious Republican struggle to elect a House leader: Boehner won by a narrow 122 to 109 margin on the second round of votes.

In the bizzaro world of mainstream television and newspaper news a nearly-equal division is misrepresented as unity while unanimous and vast-majority results are mischaracterized as disarray.

Damn the latte-sipping elite liberal media. Can't they get anything right?!

2 comments:

MEC said...

According to the Associated Press, the Republican election was a "spirited campaign" and the Democratic election was "bitter combat". The main difference accounting for these disparate descriptions is, of course, the party in question.

Eli Blake said...

According to the media, Democrats are always supposed to be divided (I guess they all learned that quote from Will Rogers in journalism school and refuse to let go of it.) So just having an election proves they are divided.

Sort of like when all the Democrats except Joe Lieberman agree on something and then he goes on FOX News and disagrees with them, all of a sudden 'Democrats are divided.'