« Blogging The Supreme Court | Main | New Bill On 'Eminent Domain' »

Parents know how cruelly children can speak to each other, so they teach their own kids that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That may be true on the playgrounds of youth, but in the political playground that is the U.S. Senate, words can get you in a heap of trouble -- especially if bloggers start telling the world what you say.

"More than most people," Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin said this week, "a senator lives by his words." And after several days of being bashed in the blogosphere, Durbin knows more than most senators just how much politicians can hurt themselves with their own words.

Durbin incurred the wrath of bloggers on the right for a June 14 Senate floor speech that compared the U.S. military treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to human rights atrocities like the Holocaust. The bloggers blasted Durbin so ceaselessly that The Chicago Tribune said they helped turn "a speech that nobody heard" into one of the hottest topics in the nation.

Durbin apologized a week later. "I am sorry," he said, "if anything I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust. ... I am also sorry if anything I said in any way cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military. ... I offer my apologies to those who are offended by my words."

But the apology offended even more bloggers than the Holocaust comparison. Durbin's initial critics pounced on all of the "ifs" in his apology, and those who had defended his underlying point about prisoner abuse lambasted him for not standing firm.

At about the same time, another batch of senators learned a different lesson about words: If you don't speak when bloggers think you should, you could take some heat for that, too.

The outcry against those senators came from the left, after the Senate on June 13 adopted a resolution of apology for the lynching of blacks throughout American history. The bloggers complained that several senators "refused" to co-sponsor the measure.

"The reason?" Americablog asked rhetorically. "So they can hide the 12 or so senators who apparently think it's bad politics back home to sign onto a resolution that apologizes for not passing anti-lynching legislation sooner."

Daily Kos and other blogs published a lynching "wall of shame" of senators who had not co-sponsored the resolution by the day of the vote -- 22 of them, including three Democrats, according to Congress' THOMAS Web site -- and blog readers started contacting those lawmakers' offices.

The pressure apparently worked. By the end of last week, 11 of the 22 remaining senators had co-sponsored the resolution. Ironically, the latecomers included Arizona Republican Jon Kyl, who, although he did not co-sponsor the measure until June 23, said on the Senate floor that he supported it "in the name of honor and national unity."

There is another irony that pulls these two tales together: Eight days before Durbin offered his apology, he delivered an impassioned apology about lynching on behalf of the Senate.

"To all who lost a loved one to lynching and to those who lost a piece of their own childhood and their own sense of security," Durbin said, "we say today formally and officially in the Senate that we were wrong -- wrong for failing to protect them, wrong because we never said we were sorry. By apologizing to the victims of lynching ... we can reclaim that piece of our soul and move forward in time as one nation indivisible."

Posted by dglover at June 25, 2005 04:23 PM

Comments

I find that to be true. buy jennifer aniston Another thing that seems carmen electra related to me: when the focus justin timberlake of a band is several different order johnny depp songwriters writing their buy orlando bloom online own material and alternately buy britney spears using the rest of the band jennifer lopez as back-up or as session kelly clarkson online musicians (and even more sarah michelle gellar noticeably when a band has buy missy elliott online initially been more of the buy avril lavigne collabourative, holistic christina aguilera bent), the music is seldom ashton kutcher

Posted by: angelina jolie at July 10, 2005 10:04 PM

Post a comment