Say Goodbye to The "Nuclear Option?"

By DHinMI

It may be the end of the road for the "nuclear option."  No, I'm not talking about the Republicans' attempt to do away with the Senate filibuster.  I'm talking about the phrase "nuclear option." 

Josh Marshall has been all over the Republican attempts to pin the term "nuclear option" on the Democrats as their self-named response to what the Republican are now trying to rename the "constitutional option."  That is, of course, a bunch of hooey, as it was the Republicans who called their planned elimination of Senate filibusters the "nuclear option." 

After a few days of trying to invert reality, the Republicans have had some success with the NYT, the LAT, NPR and a reporter from NBC who appeared this morning on Imus' show.  Thanks to Josh's work, each of those media outlets are probably getting bombarded with emails and phonecalls from people calling on them to correct the record, and make it clear that the term "nuclear option" was coined by the Republicans to describe their planned elimination of the filibuster, not by Democrats to describe their attempt to protect the filibuster. 

So, do I think we'll prevail in this effort at semantical tetherball?  No, and here's why--editors too lazy or cowardly to stand up in defense of reality will throw up their hands in exasperation and say "who knows what the story is, this is a he said/she said case, and we can't know the truth.  So from this point forward quit using the term 'nuclear option.'"

I'll be pleased to be proven wrong.  But my expectations for the DC press corps are too low to believe they'll do anything other than seek the path of least resistance, which in this case will be to avoid using the term at all. 

Comments

[Kagro X]

Frank Luntz shows tremendous restraint here. Having cowed the media into letting him edit their copy, he could just as easily have renamed it the "Frank Luntz is hung like a horse option." But he's clearly too principled to do it.