Demagogue

By now you have probably seen this Media Matters piece on how Fox News has been changing quotes and AP reports on "suicide bombers" to reflect the Fox and White House preferred term "homicide bombers."

In honor of this, I offer you a recent Bruce Fein column on judicial nominations, edited to reflect Demagogue's preferred use of language

President George W. Bush's judicial agenda is sinking because of his refusal to seek genuinely bipartisan nominees or apologize to the Democrats for the GOP's poor treatment of dozens of President Clinton's nominees.

He has wisely refrained from interceding with irresolute Republican senators to declare judicial filibusters an unconstitutional encroachment on the president's power to appoint under Article II, section 2, with simple majority approval in the Senate.

About 10 Republicans are loath to risk the threatened venom of their Democrat colleagues by destroying 200 years of Senate tradition. A modicum of bipartisanship and comity is pivotal to moving forward on any senator's agenda. The reluctant Republicans insist that President Bush's Supreme Court and subordinate federal nominees are ideological zealots who do not deserve lifetime appointments to the federal bench.

President Bush's greatest second-term accomplishment would be not to pack the federal judiciary from top to bottom with Scalia-Thomas clones, but to try to work with Senate Democrats to restore a sense of comity by nominating individuals who possess good temperaments and mainstream views. Such well-qualified candidates will undoubtedly receive the strong support of the entire Senate and go a long way toward relieving the bitter partisanship that now plagues the country.

That Bruce Fein is one fair-minded and rational Republican. I wish there were more like them.

And there will be, now that it is okay to simply change their words so that they more accurately reflect my own personal views.