Mona Charen has a great syndicated article today: Media don’t share Marines’ view of Iraq
Here’s a few of the high points:
One does not sense that members of the military share the belief so widespread in the press and Congress that the Iraq war is going very badly.
Certainly an understatement for those of us who bother to learn what’s going on for real.
I do know that since Vietnam, liberals have viewed every exercise of American military power (with the exception of those undertaken by Bill Clinton) as preludes to disaster. The very first question Ronald Reagan was asked at his first presidential press conference concerned El Salvador. The question: Did he think it was going to turn into another Vietnam? Democrats invoked Vietnam with every other sentence during the controversy about aiding the resistance in Nicaragua. More recently, just days into the Afghanistan war, The New York Times ran a front-page lament calling that conflict a new “quagmire.”
Liberals seem always to believe that America will lose its wars, and when it doesn’t, that it should.
Did ya notice the “Democratic exemption” afforded to Clinton? And that even success is a “quagmire” when Republicans are involved. And everything is Vietnam?
And, finally, Damsel related this incident she saw in another post to me over our chatroom session. Ms. Charon included it in her article. Let it just sink in . . .
A small group of Iraqis were turned away from [a] food distribution point, though they had been waiting in line for hours. They were given vouchers and told they could come to the front of the line the next morning when supplies would be replenished. These few unhappy souls were then besieged by press types eager to tell their story.
At the same site, the Marines had repaired an old Ferris wheel. The motor was dead, but when two Marines pushed and pulled by hand they could get the thing turning to give rides to the children of the Iraqi employees. A U.S. photographer watched impassively. “Why don’t you take a picture of this?” demanded one Marine. The photographer snorted, “That’s not my job.”
Asshole photographer. Asshole media.. Think about this before you buy the Times or tune in the “alphabet outlets” – ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS (need I go on?)
Update: Wizbang has a nice article about Joseph Lieberman’s (D – sometimes, DINO – otherwise) article encouraging President Bush to tout our successes in Iraq.
America if you didn’t believe us in the past, this should do nothing but reinforce how we are saying that the enemy is trying to get to you all at home to go south and demand us to come home before the job is done and that the media is soooo off mark. This just proves we are making huge gains here. Why? Because the real blind sheep, the big time news agencies, bought the trick, line and sinker from the terrorists. They fell for the oldest trick in the book, taking news tips from the enemy and paying them big cash to allow camera men to tag along with them. Yea great idea because a camera might look like an RPG to a Marine far enough away. It’s a clever technique that the US invented. Counter psyops is one way to buy out ‘reliable’ sources to submit stories to the press. This is now proof of how desperate the big time news agencies are for bad gauge on the US campaign in Iraq. They have no news so they pay for whatever may come down the line. Lowering their contacts and standards they knowingly purchase news reports and film events from the enemy.
As the world’s largest retailer and America’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart inevitably will be the target of criticism. Given the company’s disdain for unions, it’s no wonder unions loathe it so. But what doesn’t make sense is how the unions’ assertion that Wal-Mart is the enemy of poor people has become close to conventional wisdom among Democrats and many journalists. The case for this claim is flimsy.
As it is, Wal-Mart offers opportunities for motivated individuals and lower prices to the consumer – something that unions, democrats and many journalists hate.
10 YEARS OF SOHO: Where would we be without SOHO? The orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) keeps a ’round-the-clock eye on the sun and is crucial to space weather forecasting. Thousands of our readers have witnessed auroras only because SOHO spotted an incoming CME [coronal mass ejection] in time for us to issue an alert.