National Review editor Rich Lowry must be drinking the Beltway kool-aid or angling for a gig on The New York Times op-ed page because here he is selling out to the traitors in the MSM:
Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war.
Say it ain't so! And most of all what about the good news from Iraq? Lowry says "the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war." Damnit, Lowry, don't you know that only four of Iraq's eighteen provinces are violent? "True, but those provinces include 40 percent of the population, as well as the capital city, where the battle over the country’s future is being waged." It's madness. A veritable stab in the back, I say. Lowry, though, says "many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it."
Fortunately, Stanley Kurtz is on hand to explain that . . . the media is to blame for conservatives' failure to believe accurate media reports about conditions in Iraq. Fire Lowry! Kurtz for National Review Editor! Can't we bring this Lowry back:
It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq. Even as there has been a steady diet of bad news about Iraq in the media over the last year, even as some hawks have bailed on the war in despair, even as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has become everyone’s whipping boy, the U.S. military has been regaining the strategic upper hand.
Take that, MSM!
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Heads in the Sand
Kurtz's comment is really the Conservative tautology in a nutshell. It's damn near beautiful. I'm simultaneously tempted to give him a standing ovation while running headfirst into a wall.
Shorter Kurtz:
Assuming that there was a liberal media bias, we didn't believe the media, even though they were correct. The obvious solution, now that the media is vindicated and we were proven wrong, is to correct the liberal media bias which, as I just stated, only existed in our imaginations.
Posted by jfaberuiuc | December 20, 2006 11:47 AM