Monday, November 12, 2007

Cheers and Jeers Bouquets and Brickbats for The New York Times

Cheers Bouquets for The New York Times for yesterday's editorial:
It is extraordinary how President Bush has streamlined the Senate confirmation process. As we have seen most recently with the vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general, about all that is left of "advice and consent" is the "consent" part. ...

It's worth reading the whole thing. Except ...

Jeers Brickbats for The New York Times for this part of that same editorial:
On Thursday, the Senate voted by 53 to 40 to confirm Mr. Mukasey even though he would not answer a simple question: does he think waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning used to extract information from a prisoner, is torture and therefore illegal?

This is how the Times always refers to waterboarding.

To me, "simulated drowning" would involve, oh, 3-D goggles and an Imax screen and someone throwing buckets of water at you.

Waterboarding is real drowning just short of actually, you know, killing you.

The NPR program On the Media discusses use of the term.

Frank Rich's column from yesterday is also worth a read.



Note to God Is My Codependent: Let it not be said I don't listen to my audience.

7 comments:

Grammarian@mindspring.com said...

"Cheers and Jeers" is way overused. Let's come up with something else.

Jim Donahue said...

Sure, make me do all the heavy lifting.

Dave said...

I think Congress will be AWOL for anything substantive through January of '09. The Dems just want to make trouble so as to create issues, that they then don't follow through on, "there's that 60 vote thing and we only have 51;" and, the GOP are deer in headlights, trying to figure out what to do, what to do.

punkinsmom said...

Courtesy of Jon Stewart, through your link Wednesday.

Jim Donahue said...

"Depends on who's doing it"???

One can only weep.

punkinsmom said...

Hey, he was your mayor

Jim Donahue said...

Oh, don't blame me--I never lived in NYC.