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Tonight, Brian Williams on NBC News led their story about the little mess with the payroll tax deduction by saying “the fight in Washington” continues. Well, no, it doesn’t. There is no fight in Washington over the payroll tax deduction. The “fight” is entirely within the Republicans in the House of Representatives, not in Washington and not in the Congress or between Congress and the president. This is a big, important difference, sports fans.
What’s wrong with saying the truth, flat out? Does everything have to be disguised as the same old battle, the same old “gridlock” in Washington? What happened is that the Republicans and Democrats in the Senate worked out a deal to extend the tax cut for two months, pending further discussions in the coming year about an additional ten month extension. The Republicans in the Senate believed they had the agreement of the Republicans in the House to go along. When the actual bill was passed by the Senate, the House Republicans, at least a large portion of them, went nuts. Yet another cave-in to the Senate, they argued.
Forget about the fact that the Republicans opposed the payroll tax reduction to begin with. Now, the tea potters in the House say they are for it, but only as a full year extension. Once again, House Speaker John Boehner has had his head handed to him by the tea pot faction. There were strong suggestions that the reason to House didn’t want to actually vote on the bill is that it might get a majority, consisting of the non-tea pot Republicans and all of the Democrats. So, instead, a vote was taken to call for a conference committee with the Senate, something the House members knew in advance wouldn’t work because the Senate had adjourned and headed for the hills.
All of this might sound complicated and something you might want to file under “the mess in Washington”, but that would be false. Anyone who made it beyond the 10th grade in high school should be able to understand it. Underneath it all seems to be an attitude by some of the tea pot members elected last year that they don’t want anything so long as it looks like a compromise.
I suspect what is happening at NBC and other network news departments is, one, they’ve got writers who don’t really understand themselves what is happening, 2. that the writers are generally young and inexperienced who have never covered anything in in Washington, DC, and don’t know how it works. It is so easy to call it “the fight in Washington” (putting it into the popular default setting) or, as ABC News did during the debt debate, “the back and forth in Washington”. Most of the networks have people at the top, however, who have covered stories in the capital, but apparently either they can’t figure it out for themselves or they are reluctant to override the news copy they are being handed. Whichever, the result is distortion of the truth.
There is another important factor. For more than 40 years, since the days of Spiro Agnew as vice-president, the Republicans and the right have complained that they are victims of the media. The chant has been heard so often that the media itself has come to believe part of it. Besides, they are so afraid now of being called biased, that they even bend the truth to make it fit into a “he said, she said” story. The effort to be objective results in dumbing down the news into something that doesn’t really make sense, like explaining the structure of DNA through a children’s nursery rhyme.
The debt cage fight in the spring might have been a little more complicated, but this situation now is unmistakably obvious: the Republicans, meeting for more than two hours Monday night, went into a fit over this deal that was made in their name and turned on the Speaker, their own imagined leader, in the process. They kept bringing up the movie “Braveheart” and saying they had to be bold and brave and even, at one point, broke into a chant of “HOLD! HOLD! HOLD!’, echoing a theme of the movie. What are they holding? A tax hike for 160 million Americans and the end of extended unemployment benefits in this “recovery” where jobs are scarce.
What happens now? Just wait. The full year extension will be passed, pronto, either in the next few days or with lightning speed once Congress returns in January. The network news departments might not be able to figure this out, but the public will catch on and the tea pot Republicans are going to feel the heat, fast and furiously. It is going to be interesting to see what the tea potters come up with to explain this, but, in any case, the tax reduction will go through. In the process, the tea pot Republicans might have just handed the House of Representatives back to the Democrats.
Doug Terry, 12.21.11
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