Don't Forget The "ic," Ms. Schiavo

Inquirer reporter Christine Schiavo has profiled Mikey and Patrick Murphy the last two days in the paper’s Metro Bucks County section; yesterday, she wrote a piece on Fitzpatrick and his hometown connections, and today she featured Patrick and his service.

I’m not really going to take issue with much of what she said because I hold beat reporters and feature writers to a different standard than I do editorial writers and commentators (it’s possible that Schiavo was told to play up the Fitzpatrick “local” theme – which I still think is weak – and the Murphy “military service” theme).

It’s very rare that I would take issue with something a reporter wrote, though once Brian Scheid of the Bucks County Courier Times went out of his way to report that no area Democrats in the U.S. House opposed a pork-barrel spending bill that Patrick opposed a couple of months ago, which I thought was unnecessary; I only cared how Fitzpatrick voted, and of course he favored it.

As I read over what Schiavo wrote today about Patrick, I took issue only with the last paragraph, and it’s possible that it was just a matter of sloppy editing:

Murphy's candidacy is often typically Democrat. He toes the party line in supporting abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research. But he has said he voted for Bush in 2000, and he breaks with other Democrats in his support of the Patriot Act, warrantless searches, and secret courts.

"The war on terror," he told an audience at a late September debate, "has changed things."

This was the only acknowledgement of Patrick’s positions on other issues, and as you can see, it was flimsy at best (I’ll investigate the other claims in that paragraph about Patrick apart from this – not exactly where I come down, but Patrick is an infinitely better alternative than Mikey).

But the “Democrat” reference is nothing but a nod to the freeper faithful (and once more, Hendrik Hertzberg explains what’s going on with that here).