"Seldom Exercised" Recess Appointment

One thing that continually mystifies me is the disparity between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and the rest of the paper.

Yesterday, for example, Journal reporter Mark Gongloff wrote with respect to the recess appointment of John Bolton: "Using a seldom-exercised power, Mr. Bush appointed John Bolton, an Undersecretary of State dealing with weapons of mass destruction, to be the U.S. representative to the U.N."

"Seldom exercised"? Ronald Reagan used his recess appointment authority 243 times; George H. W. Bush 77 times; Bill Clinton 140 times; and now George W. Bush 105 times.

That's 565 recess appointments in 25 years -- hardly "seldom exercised".

Why is it that the Journal's "news" reporters feel compelled to portray this relatively common end-around on Senate obstructionists to be some kind of extra-constitutional usurpation of power? And, don't the guys who write the Journal's editorial pages know what these dim-wits on the news pages are doing?