Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent and, most recently, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatened Our Future (with Sheril Kirshenbaum).
Politically, Christmas this year began on the evening of December 13th. Many of us witnessed the seasons' greetings on CNN.
At 10:00 p.m. Eastern, George W. Bush was scheduled to deliver his presidential acceptance speech from the Texas House of Representatives, the site of his occasional bonding with a Texas Democrat. An hour before, Al Gore -- skewered by a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling -- had conceded the election.
Watching Ted Kennedy and Pat Leahy tear out John Ashcroft's entrails during his confirmation hearings this week -- he'll survive, damaged -- conservatives are getting desperate. And you can see it in their prose.
Covering the second day of the Ashcroft hearings for the National Review Online -- in a piece entitled "Playing the Race Card: The Democrat strategy to label Ashcroft a racist" -- Byron York quotes from an exchange between Ashcroft and Senator Joe Biden:
Over the pre-Thanksgiving weekend, as their alma maters clashed waspily in the Harvard-Yale game (Yale won) and as the candidates themselves went for highly publicized jogs (Governor Bush is faster), Al Gore and George W. Bush spinners continued their grating arguments for and against manual ballot recounts in Florida. In this battle of repetitiousness, conducted in any media forum available and with virtually interchangeable spokespersons -- bench Jim Baker for Marc Racicot; tag in David Boies when Warren Christopher starts falling asleep -- it's not particularly easy to warm up to either side. Indeed, in this respect, the post-campaign is very much like the campaign itself.
During the past month of the presidential race, "objectivity" in the mainstream media has become virtually indistinguishable from lowering the bar for George W. Bush -- despite the governor's repeated howlers. When Al Gore boasts, the press reports it as more evidence of the "Gore the Exaggerator" story line. And the Bush campaign eggs it on, sending out regular e-mails entitled: "THE GORE DETECTOR, A Regular Report on Al Gore's Adventures with the Truth." But when Bush exaggerates? Yawns.
During the past month of the presidential race, "objectivity" in the mainstream media has become virtually indistinguishable from lowering the bar for George W. Bush -- despite the governor's repeated