James Fallows calls out the media:
I’ve heard angrily from a number of reporters in the last few days. They are objecting to my claims that mainstream journalism is “enabling” Senate dysfunction by describing it as dysfunction plain and simple, rather than as the result of deliberate and extremely effective Republican strategy. That strategy, over the past four-plus years, has been to apply the once-rare threat of a filibuster to virtually everything the Administration proposes. This means that when the Democrats can’t get 60 votes for something, which they almost never can, they can’t get nominations confirmed, bills enacted, or most of what they want done.
You can consider this strategy brilliant and nation-saving, if you are a Republican. You can consider it destructive and nation-wrecking, if you are a Democrat. You can view it as just what the Founders had in mind, as Justice Scalia asserted recently at an Atlantic forum. You can view it as another step down the road to collapse, since the Democrats would have no reason not to turn the same nihilist approach against the next Republican administration. Obviously I think it does more harm than good. You can even argue that it’s stimulated or justified by various tactics that Democrats have used.
But you shouldn’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. That was my objection to a recent big Washington Post story on what is wrong with the Senate, which did not contain the word “filibuster.” And there is an example again this very day. I wish to Heaven that the item had appeared somewhere else, but it happens that it’s also in the Post. A story on what happened to Obama’s jobs-bill proposal in the Senate concentrates on the two Plains States Democrats, Ben Nelson and Jon Tester, who defected during the cloture vote — and not on the 100% Republican opposition to even bringing this bill up for consideration.
Go read the whole thing. Fallows is correct. Our media narrative is a huge problem.