I'm happy to see this!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12056758All-Nighter Focuses Media Attention on War Pullout
“Even now, with all the news stories about senior Senate Republicans bailing out on Bush, the number who will actually vote against the president on the floor remains in single digits.”
NPR.org, July 18, 2007 · Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid kept the Senate in throughout the night and into Wednesday morning, debating a measure that would dramatically de-escalate the war in Iraq.
The tactic was immediately ripped as a terrible idea and hailed as a great one, and it may have been both.
Let's start with what was terrible. Having the men and women who make up the Senate miss a night's sleep is never a good idea. They are too old to keep such hours, and as a group they cannot muster the grace to hide it. That means Reid will pay a price in comity and cooperation for the strain of this round-the-clock session.
But Reid was taking a larger risk than that, the risk of seeming sophomoric. Pulling an all-nighter? What would be next for the Senate, a toga party? The jokes about slumber parties and panty raids were inevitable, and they came close to overshadowing the grave issue at hand.
But if much of the media attention was derisive, all of it served Reid's larger purpose — which was to foster media attention. In the previous week, the Senate slogged through days of debate on the defense authorization bill and weighty anti-war amendments came and went with little notice. Most of the country had no idea the Senate was even on the subject. Those whose news source is the liberal blogosphere may well have thought Congress had ignored the issue all year.
Now, thanks to TV shots of cots being rolled out and old movie clips of Jimmy Stewart in 1939, the country has some notion that its solons are indeed doing battle over the war.more...
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