Down the memory hole
Charles Hurt reports that Congress has censors:
Only in this town of lawyers along the Potomac can politicians utter statements that were, according to official history, never spoken.
When writing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers mandated the recording of Congress’ proceedings, but its form was left to the lawmakers who established the Congressional Record and the rules that allow them to clean up regretful remarks, miscues and misstatements before they are published.
So, whenever a member of congress says something stupid or offensive, the record of it is wiped. Too bad there’s not such a feature for their stupid actions.
Note: This is a reprint from guest posting at No Silence Here.
June 9th, 2005 at 10:10 am
Ah, c’mon. Are you saying you’ve never blogged anything that made sense at the momemnt, looked at it again an hour or two later and said “whoa,” and then edited out the offending statement as though it had never been there? I’d be lying if I said I’d never done that. Just thing of the Congressional Record as one huge, incredibly boring group blog.
June 9th, 2005 at 10:20 am
Good analogy. I have but generally do not and prefer to use updates to note the change (unless it’s a wording clarification or grammar fix).However, congressmonkeys should be held to higher standards in the public eye. If some anonymous goober says something dumb (in fact, i say more dumb shit before noon than most people say all day), who cares? When a congressperson says something like that, i’d say it’s a much bigger deal.
June 9th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
There’s a lesson here, and it’s this: omission is the most insidious form of bias.
You like to whine about the media bias against guns, and you certainly have a valid point, but often you’re criticizing stories that were printed. Sometimes you note omissions from those stories, but the worst kind of bias is the kind that keeps stories from ever being printed.
The void at the heart of the idea that the media is liberal is that the point of view of the powerful is never omitted from a story. It might be challenged, but it’s always there. The little guy gets no such assurance.
It works the same way with politics. Sometimes lobbyists work to create bills that will benefit them or their clients, as we saw in the Tenn Waltz sting, but what the really powerful lobbyists do is persuade lawmakers to do nothing, to swallow a bill in committee, defer action, that sort of thing.
It’s the bias of that which gets wiped from the record or never enters the record at all that we really need to watch out for.