Monday May 26, 2003

THE STORY GOES AWAY. Matthew Yglesias points to Josh Marshall, who says the below mentioned DeLay issue is journalistically moot because it's a dog-bites-man story -- DeLay is a notoriously "hardball" type of operative, so no one finds it surprising (or, by that narrow defintion, newsworthy) that he may have misused the resources of a Federal agency in pursuit of a partisan vendetta. Marshall also says that "it's not simply a partisan or bias issue," though I seem to recall an ocean of ink devoted to allegations that Bill Clinton had his operatives shut down LAX so he could get a $200 haircut.

Marshall also brings up the in-some-ways-similar example of Trent Lott, which is all the segue fodder I need. "At least in the first few days, no one gave the Lott situation much attention because pretty much everyone knew that Lott was fairly unreconstructed on racial issues," says Marshall. "(After all, only three years before, his close ties to a white-supremacist group had been widely reported in the Washington Post and other papers.) So it really wasn't such a surprise that he thought this way."

This seems to go against Marshall's point rather than for it, and maybe he's suggesting that the DeLay case, like Lott's, may catch-a-fire over time.

I doubt that. As I wrote copiously about the Lott takedown, Crimson cons/and doves of teel/worked together to cut the Trent Lott deal because each side got something out of it. The liberals got to pile on a noisome conservative, and the conservatives got to show that they do too hate prejudice, so there.

While there are a few conservatives out there in the electronic hustings who view askance the whole Homeland Security trip, I don't see enough percentage for them in a Lott-style takedown of DeLay to motivate a show of outrage.

Blogospheric pressure is thus weakened, and absent, as shown, Big Media interest in the case, the story goes away.

This is a profoundly cyncial analysis, but these days, in so many cases, those are the only kind that make sense.