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June 22, 2005
DeLay DeLoser
Pete over at A Perfectly Cromulent Blog did a fantastic job today of skewering the latest stupid thing to come out of Tom DeLay's mouth. In a nutshell, DeLay employed his usual whiny tactic of crying about the media... asked about how poorly things seem to be going in Iraq and whether the Bush White House needs an exit strategy, DeLay complained about the media rather than answering the question, saying "You know, if Houston, Texas, was held to the same standard as Iraq is held to, nobody'd go to Houston, because all this reporting coming out of the local press in Houston is violence, murders, robberies, deaths on the highways."
I can't do a better job than Pete did of deconstructing this; Pete sorted through the day's Houston Chronicle headlines and compared them to Iraq... and it's damn funny. But what I will do is point out that in his statement DeLay proved the fallacy of his own primary argument; every time he gets in trouble (or really any time the news is not spun in a pro-conservative fashion), he whines about the biased media.
Well Tom, if you're to be believed, then all the media does in Houston is print bad news. Now, no one will ever argue that Houston is a hotbed of liberalism -- they elect DeLay every term instead of putting the SOB in jail where he belongs, after all. So if the media in conservative Houston reports the worst of what happens, wouldn't that prove that the media always reports on bad news? (After all, good things or the average ordinary every day event aren't "news," they're just ordinary -- to be "news," it has to be out of the ordinary.) And wouldn't that mean that, rather than reflecting some nefarious liberal bias, the media's coverage of Iraq is simply reflective of the fact that bad things are news, and nothing happening is not news? That the media isn't biased so much as simply doing its job?
If DeLay had his way, you would never hear about a single bomb, a single firefight, a single death in Iraq. DeLay routinely engages in a sinister version of "Life Is Beautiful." Too bad for him that we're not stupid enough to fall for it.
