Not-a-Real Memorandum
To: On-Air Personalities
From: NBC News Management
Subject: Watch your language!With less than two weeks left before the election, naturally we're all excited at the prospect, after 12 long years in the wilderness, that we will finally be winning back the majority in one or perhaps even both houses of Congress.
With victory this close at hand, it's important that none of us provide any fodder for Republicans - or those annoying right-wing media critics - to claim that we are, well, doing what we're doing - rooting for a Democratic win.
So please, be extra careful with your language. Don't say anything revealing that we identify with the Democrats.
Yours in a Pelosi Speakership,
The Management
Looks like Meredith Vieira didn't get the 'apocryphal-but-accurate' memo. Interviewing Joe Biden on this morning's Today, she let this beauty slip:
"If the Democrats were to win these mid-term elections, and it's looking pretty good, at least in the House, the Senate up for grabs at this point, what would you try to force the president to do that he's not doing?"
Whoops!
Aside: Speaking of our military in Iraq, Biden said: "I'm not going to have our kids there getting killed because [the Iraqi government] won't do even what their own constitution calls for."
Biden's hubris as to what he will and will not "have" aside, are you - like me - put off by his reference to our "kids" fighting in Iraq? Some are young, but the members of our military fighting in Iraq and around the world are true men and women - not kids.
