Republicans Are From Action; Democrats From Consulting

The headline of a post on AMERICAblog reads Congressional leaders were informed, not consulted about domestic spying. Then a couple paragraphs from a TIME article (which I've shortened and posted below) are cited in the post:

Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic majority leader, says the Administration knows it did not have that implicit authority [to spy on Americans without a warrant] because White House officials had sought unsuccessfully to get congressional leaders to include explicit language approving no-warrant wiretaps in the resolution. Attorney General Gonzales says the Administration decided to go forward with the program anyway because it was convinced that the President possessed the inherent power to act.

What I'm particularly interested in pointing out here is the AMERICAblog headline really shows in summary form how the Bush administrations manages to dominate the Democrats and, most of the time, manipulate the media and thereby the American people.

According to the Republican's master narrative, "consulting" is something liberals would do. The Bush gang acts (always for their own benefit, of course), and then excoriates straw-men liberals for being too weak to act. Republicans then claim liberal inaction puts American lives at risk, which disqualifies them for leadership. Very neat. Very effective.

Cynically, Republicans take advantage of the American culture's admiration for "men of action." Couple this with the way media companies are organized -- to pursue and report news -- and the mostly positive depiction of the actions of "men of action" -- newsmakers -- become clear. Bush and his gang have been a total action system since 9/11, acting, acting, acting. Democrats have been wathching, watching, watching, and occasionally complaining, complaining, complaining. This could perhaps be summarized in the following journalistic metaphor: Republicans Do Headllines. Democrats Do Sub-Heads.

One can only hope that soon the Bush gang's execrable "actions" -- all of them tyrannical, self-serving, and, of course, simply bad -- and the regrettable results of those actions -- anti-democratic and anti-human results most of them, will finally become so apparent that the scales will fall from the eyes of enough Americans that the Bush gang will begin to "consult" with more moderate voices in its own party. Then maybe some of the worst excesses of this total action system will be stymied, at least for a while.