Short: Editorial spin

You don't have to make up magnificent lies and conspiracy theories to be a biased commenter. In fact, a bit of subtlety can make the spin more believable. Here is the Wall Street Journal, writing about the extension of the payroll tax holiday:

"...then Messrs. Boehner and McConnell were gulled into going behind closed doors with the President, who dragged out negotiations and later emerged to sandbag them with his blame-the-GOP and soak-the-rich re-election strategy. Any difference between the parties on taxes and spending has been blurred in the interim."

Obama sounds like a political Svengali, gulling less wily, less experienced politicians into compromising positions. How evil of Obama, we are led to think.

If you bother to question the WSJ's version, you might wonder how two politicians experienced enough to rise to the offices of House Speaker and Senate Minority Leader could be lured into negotiations and then sandbagged. Could it be that they entered the negotiations with a terrible weak position? Why, yes indeed, that's a possibility. Maybe they also overplayed their hand, and their bluff was called, and they lost their shirts.

A Speaker of the House and a Minority Leader of the Senate should know their way around a political negotiation. So should the editors of the Wall Street Journal. Try this spin on someone else.

Diabolical!

  Photo credit: Salon.com