Your Sunday Politics: Artful Speaking Edition
Official Washington can be filled with moments of official awkwardness. And this past week was filled with multiple instances of slips of the tongue, or at least Ciceronian rhetoric that could have been crafted and executed in a slightly better fashion.
Starting with another pitched confirmation battle, President Bush’s nominee for ambassador to 
the United Nations, the sartorially impaired diplomatic guru John Bolton (left), faced some intense scrutiny from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Bush administration has been doing all it can to support Bolton, who received some glowing references from five former secretaries of State along with a hodgepodge of other Cabinetry and other senior officials in governmentalia. The most recent spate of endorsements was designed to undercut Senate Democrats, who had managed to hold up the committee vote.
For their part, Democrats seized on various statements that Bolton had previously made about the United Nations, including his dismissive comment at a Federalist Society Forum: "If the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference," as well as a 1994 statement: "There is not such thing as the United Nations." California Sen. Barbara Boxer, providing material for a future Amy Poeler imitation, chided Bolton, saying "It's hard for me to know why you’d want to work at an institution that you said didn’t even exist." Metaphor, Barbara. They’re literally called metaphors.
The vote on Bolton in committee is scheduled for Tuesday. Previously, many had speculated that the Republican senator from Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, was the committee member who could be drawn to the Democrats' side of the issue. While Chafee has, uhh, chafed at the thought of Bolton taking the position, comparing his managerial style to that of George Steinbrenner, it looked last week like Chafee was leaning toward voting for the nomination. 
However, the late word from last week was that the ground under Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel (at right) had started to soften. Hagel, previously considered to be a solid vote for support, waffled Friday after learning Bolton had ordered an intelligence analyst removed from his job." That analyst, as it turns out, now works on Hagel’s Senate staff. Umm, awkward!
Speaking of awkward: "Sometimes I get a little more passionate, and particularly during the moment, and the day that Terri Schiavo was starved to death, emotions were flowing ... I probably said -- I did, I didn't probably -- I said something in an inartful way, and I shouldn't have said it that way, and I apologize for saying it that way."
Who’s that we hear sucking up now (he's at left)? It’s House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), apologizing for momentarily forgetting he was not playing the role of Commodus in "Gladiator" and suggesting that judges in the Terro Schiavo case would "answer for their behavior." DeLay’s amends came on the heels of being recently damned with faint praise by Scott McClellan, who, when asked if relations between Bush and DeLay were friendly, replied: "He certainly is a friend ... I think there are different levels of friendship with anybody."
Another public figure who might do well to consider a more artful way of speaking is former President Bill Clinton, who when asked his thoughts of GOP operative Arthur Finkelstein’s plan to put together a "Swift Boat" style group to spoil his wife’s 'presidential ambitions, instead veered wildly around the question to "play the gay card" and indulge himself in some Krauthammerian psychological mumbo-jumbo:
I was sad ... I mean, there were two stories. One is that he went to Massachusetts and married his longtime male partner, and then he comes back here and announces this [anti-Hillary campaign]. I thought one of two things: Either this guy believes his party is not serious and is totally Machiavellian in its position [on gay rights], or you know, as David Brock said in his great book "Blinded by the Right," there's some sort of self-loathing or something. I was more sad for him.
Well, at least he worked in a plug for David Brock! 
And speaking of shameless plugs, do you remember intrepid reporter Karen Ryan (at right)? The FCC stepped in this week to regulate Karen’s stock in trade: the Video News Release. (Karen, by the way lives and operates her communications group out of a home in the sedate Palisades.) VNRs, essentially packaged propaganda pieces meant to fit seamlessly into a typical television news report and take advantage of the fact that local broadcast media are basically filled with stupid people who loathe doing their own work, are and were a go-to tactic for both parties in the battle for public relations going back over a decade. According to new FCC regulations, however, broadcasters must now offer full disclosure of any VNR they air, fully identifying the source of the piece. The FCC warns: "We will take appropriate enforcement action against entities that do not comply with these rules." What will Karen Ryan, so recently employed by a fake news organization do now that she needs to get a real job? Well, we hear the non-existent United Nations needs a U.S. ambassador.