This is how it goes lately between the White House and the press corps -- constant sniping and gibes, a battle fought largely between the lines. "You guys are a bunch of negative, nattering, pro-terrorist pinkos." "Oh yeah? Well you're gonna lose big-time in November."
Nobody says it exactly this way, but if you had a magic decoder ring and pointed it at the daily news cycle, that would be the translation.
So let's assume the latest oracular visions are correct and the GOP suffers a major defeat, something approaching if not matching the stunning Democratic losses of 1994. That would be the political equivalent of an earthquake. But would it have any implications for the media? Would it change the dynamic between the Bush team and the journalists who cover them?
A November defeat for the Republicans will change everything. If Bush suffers a major political setback, the media will feel freed up to tear into this war as they have never done before. Again, it will not be a conscious, orchestrated decision -- there will be no covert meeting at which senior editors and producers conspire to declare Iraq an epic failure. But the pack will change direction, as it always does when it smells blood.
Journalists are dumb beasts in the main, but they have sharp teeth and there are a lot of them.
If ever an administration needed to be "catastrophically deconstructed" by a pack of snarling, previously whimpering curs who were beaten into submission, it's this one.
November.
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