Perhaps Lauren Sforza of The Hill might consider obtaining a more comprehensive thesaurus. For years, the media overused the word "pounce" as in "Republicans pounced" when portraying the GOP as taking implied unfair advantage of a situation to the detriment of the Democrats. In fact, "pounce" had been hyped so often that it eventually became a laughable cliché which eventually became embarrassing to use especially due to outlets such as NewsBusters pointing out the absurd frequency of the term in the liberal media.
As a result, synonyms were found to replace "pounce" of which "seize" and "jump" were among the favorites. Unfortunately, those latter terms ended up being overused as well to the extent that new synonyms need to be found.
An example of "seized" and "jump" being used when the author would dearly love to write the tried and true "pounce" occurred on Sunday when Sforza wrote "Republicans jump on ‘lab leak’ report, call for action against China."
The "jump" in the title was immediately followed by "seizing" in the very first sentence:
Republicans are seizing on a new Energy Department conclusion pointing to a “lab leak” as causing the COVID-19 outbreak to call for swift action against the Chinese government, which has refused to cooperate with global probes into the pandemic’s origin.
The main focus of the rest of the article followed this pattern in which the primary interest was not so much in the lab link theory being validated by the Energy Department, but rather how the Republicans are taking unfair advantage of this finding.
The lack of confidence or details on the assessment didn’t stop Republicans from claiming validation and calling for urgent action against China.
The rest of the article is a laundry list of (to liberals) culprits pouncing, seizing, or jumping on the revelation about a government department giving credence to the lab leak theory. Included in Sforza's list are the usual suspects such as Senators Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Marsha Blackburn along with the inevitable Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Amidst the listing of those nasty, nasty Republicans, China itself barely made an appearance. Because we know who the real enemies are.
Now back to that thesaurus...
