Trousers burn in capitol conflagration

Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.

Last week provided us the highly diverting spectacle of members of "the greatest deliberative body in the world" lying about judicial nominees and the filibuster.

These lies included sins of commission and sins of omission, bald misstatements of fact, quotes egregiously out of context, and calculated misinterpretations. It was a veritable carnival of mendacity, made all the more entertaining by the participants' sober demeanor.

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All in all, the Democrats displayed the finer style, as the GOP could not match the Irish flair of Pat Leahy, Harry Reid and the ineffable Teddy Kennedy. While the Republicans lied sincerely, their stodgy rhetoric simply did not measure up to the passionate untruths of the minority party.

Bill Frist and his minions simply must learn to prevaricate with more conviction. One could see they really didn't buy their own argument that the use of the filibuster to block judicial appointments was unprecedented. It was almost as if they felt their goal wasn't worthy of the sacrifice of their honor.

On the other hand, the Democrats projected true dedication to their cause as they lied that appellate court nominees Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen were "out of the mainstream" and that the filibuster was enshrined in the Constitution.

However, the biggest lie of the entire festival of falsehood was the contention that George W. Bush's court nominees had been filibustered. The fact is, the Republicans have caved in without forcing a real filibuster. They ought to leave the Senate rules alone, and they ought to have the backbone to force the Democrats to talk themselves hoarse, like Strom Thurmond fighting civil-rights legislation.

(Thurmond's filibuster, in fact, was cited by California Sen. Diane Feinstein, who seemed to be praising the late racist's performance. Odd, what?)

Let the GOP stalwarts bring Brown's or Owen's name to the floor, then camp out in their offices, ready to answer every quorum call, while Democrats hold the floor and rattle on about the "mainstream."

It would be fine theater that would have the added benefit of keeping our lawmakers out of the mischief they might get into if they weren't tied up in debate.

This is fantasy, of course. Such a move would require more spine than GOP legislators have displayed for years.

Journalistic matters: Why has the Washington press corps tried to turn the Newsweek Quran-flushing story into a tale of "questionable" White House pressure? Because, on the whole, the D.C. media constitute the laziest, most self-serving and hypersensitive aggregation of so-called reporters in the nation.

These "journalists" recognize that they easily could be caught in the kind of fatal bias and sloppiness that Newsweek committed, so they are naturally defensive.

As for one reporter's question – "Should the president of the United States be telling an American magazine what to write?" – the answer is, "Why not?"

The president, like any citizen, is free to criticize the work of the media.

Meanwhile, we're hearing hints of the CBS defense – that while the story's source may have been wrong, the questions raised by the false report need to be answered. Puh-leeze!

Newsweek's gaffe amply demonstrates that many journalists do not recognize that the War on Terror is a real war, with psychological and propaganda components. It also demonstrates an inexplicable lack of understanding of both the nature of the enemy and of the power of words.

Were you asking yourself why the purchasers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would agree to maintain the newspaper's current editorial policies for five years?

The answer is simple: Modern publishers generally don't care about editorial policies – they care about profits.

If we are to have newspapers, unfortunately somebody has to own them, and it's advisable to keep in mind Byron's modification of John 18:40: "Now Barabbas was a publisher."