Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Yes, We Are Looking at You, Dylan Beers of Politico
Scott Lemieux: I Am Outraged That Liberal Journalists Don’t Love Ted Cruz!y:
Ted Cruz + Politico = hacktacular!
Charles Pierce: Dylan Byers Ted Cruz Filibuster--Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part The Infinity:
One of today's conservative tropes is that The Liberal Media is being rough on Tailgunner Ted… while The Liberal Media turned Texas legislator Wendy Davis into a hero for doing the same thing. This would go unremarked. Conservative whining about their status as victims no longer qualifies as news. Ah, but that is reckoning without the intrepid Dylan Byers, "media" reporter for Tiger Beat On The Potomac and applier of soothing balm to wounded wingnut fee-fees everywhere.
Sen. Ted Cruz has been speaking on the Senate floor for almost 19 hours, as of this post. The talk is not technically a filibuster - he can't actually block the Senate from going about its business - but symbolically, it's more or less the same thing. The point is to show one's opposition to something through a demonstration of physical will.
No, it's not. A filibuster has a point, a definable political objective. What Cruz is doing has nothing that concrete. And it is not the case that these are identical because, "symbolically," they are the political equivalent of caber-tossing. One was a filibuster. The other is a long speech. I can't keep filling in these gaps in people's educations.
Tom Scocca: Why Is the Press Conspiring to Silence American Hero Ted Cruz?:
So, unlike the filibuster delivered by Texas state senator Wendy Davis in the legislature there--which is the reference point for all the complaints about a double standard being applied to Cruz--Cruz's speech has no legislative purpose at all and does not represent or advance the agenda of his own party in the Senate. The more relevant analogy would be Anthony Weiner showboating for YouTube in 2009 by passionately calling for a single-payer healthcare system, long after the lawmakers who actually make laws had settled on the design of the Affordable Care Act…. Nevertheless and despite all that: Media Bias!
[Y]ou can forgive conservatives for being upset with the mainstream media's coverage of the Cruz affair.
Can we? Must we? As usual, the right-wing victimology runs on its own logic, without reference to facts.
