I'm mostly over a Greg's place today, but I'll do a quick post here based on a twitter exchange...it's in reference to Ted Cruz's questioning of Chuck Hagel today, which featured a bunch of dubious Hagel quotes.
So I said: "GOP takeaway from 2012 seems to have been: wow, we need more campaigns built around out-of-context quotes"
To which Matt Yglesias had the sensible reply: "It’s a kind of hammer/nail issue, right? They’re really good at drawing attention to out of context quotes."
Yeah, that's just about right.
I suppose I can also do the "elsewhere" stuff here, since it's relevant: at Plum Line I said that the hearing won't matter much but that the question is whether Hagel will have 60 votes; oddly enough several people are treating the possibility of a filibuster as if it was 1990 and that Republicans might just let him win with 55 votes. And at PP I talked about what confirmation is supposed to be for.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
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Is it just me or is the media treating these hearings a lot like a presidential debate? There seems to be a lot of coverage on style, Mike Hirsch wrote at Hotline today: "The long pauses and agonizingly careful answers held up for the most part when it came to substance—though he did fumble once on whether he supported “containment” against Iran—but Hagel was moving at the pace of a tortoise while some of his harshest critics, like Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., were darting around him like hares" I don't really understand what that is suppose to mean, Hagel should be talking faster? This will change people's minds? Journalists writing about foreign policy should mainly write about who looks "better" on TV hearings nobody outside of the beltway watches? Anyway, it seems like a new kind of travesty, the not hearing hearing, maybe we could have people on the red carpet outside of the committee room arguing over people's ties?
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