Quo vadis?

Whither goest thou?

I invite you to join me on a brief excursion into flip-flop land. What follows was copied verbatim from the Scrapbook of the current issue of the Weekly Standard.

## These editorials are only ten years apart. In the first one, the Times sees the Republican use of the filibuster against the Democratic majority, as reprehensible. In the second, the Times loudly applauds the use of this stratagem by the Democrats against the Republican majority. I have no argument with the Times taking this ambiguous position, its their prerogative. But I do believe it should have made a credible effort to explain to its readers, its rationale for doing so.

A January 1, 1995, Times editorial on proposals to restrict the use of Senate filibusters:

In the last session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him. . . . Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate views, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, . . . an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.

A March 6, 2005, Times editorial on the same subject:

The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House’s judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. . . . To block the nominees, the Democrats’ weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. . . . The Bush administration likes to call itself “conservative,” but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

This newspaper is being taken into strange and chilling territory by an Editorial Staff that has ostensibly divested itself of its former, unassailable editorial integrity. For the Old Gray Lady to retain a modicum of credibility, it should cease to misrepresent itself. It should acknowledge that it has undergone a structural metamorphosis. It is now stridently and undeniably partisan.