I have written quite often about the failures of the MSM which have been most marked since they abandoned any attempt to achieve objectivity in the service of a partisan agenda, a trend that accelerated after the election of George W. Bush and our involvement in what was formerly known as the "Global War on Terror." I recognize that some of my resentment comes from feeling betrayed by the MSM organs that I once saw as striving to tell "all the news that's fit to print" and some of my resentment relates to finding the cherry picking done by the MSM to be dishonorable and harmful to our nation's interests.
There is, however, yet another way in which our MSM have failed us, and this threatens to have powerful repercussions once the next President's honeymoon has ended.
The New York Times has a small article by Adam Nossiter on the front page of its web site today. In Standing Against the War, but Unsure How to End It, he reports on a Minnesota Congressional District that tossed out a Republican in the last election in favor of a Democrat who vowed to end the war in Iraq:
Tim Walz, the new Democratic congressman from the First District here, has made tough statements, voted with his party for withdrawal and emerged as a leader among the Democratic freshmen who owe their November triumphs to weariness with the war.
It is not at all surprising to read the comment from the quoted constituents that Iraq is a civil war, Iraq is in chaos, Iraq is a quagmire, and all the typical rather empty memes that have been so successfully established in the public mind as the image of authenticity in relation to our war. Also unsurprsing, nowhere in the article does the reporter comment or elicit a comment that questions such conventional wisdom about Iraq. The article is written as if the surge never existed, let alone acknowledging that there are many promising signs of progress on the streets and in the villages and cities of Iraq. As a result, in the absence of any apparent awareness that conditions have shifted in Iraq in the last few months, a perplexing and potentially crippling problem forfends.
Congressman Walz may be starting to notice the problem:
Last November, Mr. Walz, 43, managed to upend a six-term Republican incumbent, Gil Gutknecht, by 53 percent to 47 percent, with help from voters like Ms. Pfiffner, and by playing on his 24 years in the National Guard and his clear stand against current war policy, though he did not endorse immediate withdrawal. Mr. Gutknecht also scrambled to edge away from the Bush administration on the war, but it was evidently too little, too late for the district’s angry voters.
A plain-spoken former schoolteacher singled out early by the House leadership, Mr. Walz was chosen by Democratic leaders to make a radio rebuttal to President Bush in January, and in February he said on the House floor that the “nation is no longer willing to wage war based on ideology and failed policy.”
But exactly what it is willing to do is another matter, Mr. Walz acknowledged during a trip home this weekend. He finds his war-skeptic constituents frustrated and uncertain.
“The thing that’s been left out is the ‘how,’ ” he said. His constituents “want to do this in a responsible manner that protects our troops and our interest.”
Voters in the First District have “this conflicted notion that we need to do the right thing, but we need to do it responsibly,” Mr. Walz said, adding that there was a “sense of urgency to get this done, but a frustration that there’s no insight into the after part.”
The MSM has done an exemplary job of depicting Iraq as an impossible situation that cannot be "won" in any conventional meaning of the term. The have also done an exemplary job of establishing in the relatively unsophisticated viewer that Iraq is a disaster of epic proportions. By consistently failing to include any news that might temper such descriptions, the MSM has convinced most Americans that Iraq is hopeless. Yet, at the same time, in a less coherent way, the MSM has conveyed in their meta-communications, that if we abandon Iraq it will be a significant victory for those who oppose us, despite all the efforts to separate al Qaeda's Sunni extremism form the Shia extremism int he neighborhood.
The dirty little secret for the Democrats and the MSM is that the far left former fringe that has leveraged their early opposition to the war into a position of significant power in the Democratic party in fact desire an American loss and humiliation in Iraq.
[For those interested in a typical comment of this nature, take a look at Dr. Sanity's post today in which she quotes a comment from Dave, who makes explicit what so many on the left believe.]
Democratic politicians, for the most part, do not subscribe to such overtly anti-American beliefs and have no interest in presiding over an American catastrophe that will make Vietnam seem like a minor set-back in comparison. Even Barak Obama, who touts his anti-war bona fides with some regularity in front of friendly audiences, agrees that we will need to keep our troops in Iraq for quite some time. Parsing the Democratic rhetoric, their proposals that we keep enough troops in Iraq to fight al Qaeda and for force protection while tolerating the inevitable genocide once we remove our troops from the "civil war", suggest that the Democrats do not really agree with the Daily Kos left that we must lose the war. This is the weakness in using the angry Left for traction.
[Mick Stockinger notes that even Markos Zuninga Moulitsas, proprietor of the Daily Kos, has become concerned at the venom being spewed from the Left.]
[Hillary Clinton came close to admitting the problem when she publicly insisted that Bush get our troops out before she comes into office. That is the only way she can avoid making the War into her war; once she is in office she will no longer be able to escape responsibility.]
The opportunistic position of the Democrats and the MSM has been to eschew discussing the various options for withdrawal and their consequences and to focus on the agreed upon desire to get the troops out of Iraq.
Once the Democrats control the Congress and the White House, someone is going to be in for some serious disillusionment. And the far Left, who tend to despise accommodationists in their party, will not remain quiet or be bought off easily.
The MSM by facilitating the simple minded approach to Iraq has left the American public ill prepared for understanding the complexity and the necessity of our war efforts. Further, and even more egregious, they have failed to press the Democrats to seriously consider the consequences of their easy sound bite solutions to the conflict. Real debates inform and elucidate; our MSM has failed in every way to do their job.
Recent Comments