Dateline: NEW YORK—Make no mistake, journalists drilled down and told a cautionary tale of the bombshell that landed on a dumpster fire in the middle of a firestorm, after the grilling of senators who pivoted to whether they’d reached a tipping point or were just playing politics, not fearing the optics of thinking outside the box at the crossroads of their last ditch effort, although there was plenty of blame to go around in this searing indictment of the favourite Washington parlor game that turned a blind eye on a potent symbol of the game-changer which donned the mantle of a hotly contested feeding frenzy.
Needless to say, it remains to be seen in the 24-hour news cycle of the digital age, whether, at first glance, the woefully inadequate, byzantine rules that burst onto the scene will allow the punditocracy to breathe a sigh of relief or will force it to probe the powers that be for the American people, but those rules double-down with strange bedfellows in the wake of keen observers of tongue-wagging, well-heeled lobbyists who met with an ignominious end in the final analysis at the end of the day when, for all intents and purposes, cooler heads prevailed at the inflection point of no return that was shrouded in secrecy in an ill-advised, much-ballyhooed, hastily-convened, closely-watched and oft-cited paradigm shift of a broken system that underscores the object lesson of this Rorschach test.
Be that as it may, this is not your father’s tectonic shift, if you will, and Christmas came early for skittish donors in that land of contradictions which ushered in an eye-popping era in a nutshell that, contrary to popular belief, prevented anyone from acknowledging the new normal in which there are no face-saving compromises and we all press each other’s hot-button issues which are the talk of the town, yet a portrait emerges of a grizzly veteran who endured withering criticism in a dizzying array of wide-ranging interviews in a nondescript office building, and of the poster child of an unsung hero who was tapped to rise from obscurity and spark a debate that raised the specter of hand-wringing partisans on both sides who traded barbs in a war of words and walked on thin ice in a charm offensive, going forward as creatures of Washington in a stinging rebuke to the fevered speculation of the proverbial growing body of evidence that shines a spotlight on a political football, which raises more questions than answers about the tightly knit social fabric.