From "flip-flopping" to "finessing": get ready for the next round

Good insight today from Bob Somerby, The Daily Howler, on word usage – perhaps better to call it word abusage – in the national political press corps:

A FLIP TO FINESSED: Democrats should be on alert for the verb “finessed/finessing,” which seems to be a new press favorite. This week, we’ve seen it applied to Clinton (by Broder, Ifill, Soledad O’Brien). But have McCain and Giuliani been “finessing” their views? Saints John and Rudy are virile, manly men. So far, we haven’t seen a single scribe who has judged that such men have ”finessed.”

And it's a French word, no less, a verbal "two-fer" against the Democrats.

The whole thing is worth a look, as always:

• No use of the term “flip-floppers” to describe the massive flip-flops McCain and Giuliani are doing on, for example, abortion (E.J. Dionne, Wash Post).
• Sticking Gore, as always, wrongly as always, into the legion of “flip-flopping” or “reinventing-themselves” Democrats – this time on abortion, as if he had changed his views over his political career on choice, even though that is false (much less quite the same as changing it over the space of months!)
• The guys like Chris Matthews (MSNBC) and Richard Cohen (Wash Post and syndicated) who simply cannot mention anything about Hillary without bringing in Bill’s sexual conduct or proclivities.
• The logic of citing something revealed about Bush for the first time in 2004 to establish what was known or should have been obvious in 2002 (Richard Cohen).
• The sophistication of people like Dana Milbank (Wash Post) and Maureen Dowd (NYT) that enables them to focus on what’s really important and discern the body language that shows how candidates (or other public figures) “feel” at any given event -- without ever quite demonstrating why we are supposed to care.