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July 23, 2008
Good Point: Without Even Noting Our Victory, Media Has Gone From Claim "War Cannot Be Won" to "War Cannot Be Lost"
Neat trick, that.
Obama's surrender and defeat strategy was previously sound because the war couldn't be won. So "defeat" was already guaranteed; what's the downside of withdrawal?
Without a single front-page piece announcing to the world the War in Iraq has been all but won, the media shifts its claim -- repealing their coverage sub silencio, as lawyers say when judges overturn a previous decision while pretending they didn't.
Now the war cannot be lost, so Obama's policies are borderline irrelevant, and there's no risk at all electing him. If he withdraws precipitously, not taking into account changing facts on the ground (such as the long-time-coming Al Qaeda mini-Tet), well, there's still no downside. Nothing The Chosen One can do can possibly result in harm.
Grayhawk makes this point in a long piece about the left's collective meltdown over McCain's "lose a war to win a political campaign" remark.
I am still bewildered that the media believes this is somehow proper. They went from assuming the war was unwinnable -- and frequently stating that explicitly -- to assuming the war is unloseable, without once prominently reporting on the fact we're winning the war, and in fact have nearly won in.
They do not report this directly. It's always assumed as background information in reports on other matters.
I'm sorry, MSM, but this will simply will not do. You cannot assume a victory in a major war as background information without even actually reporting on that.
Think of how bizarre this is. Imagine if the media never actually bothered who'd won a presidential campaign, but instead simply changed one day from reporting on President Clinton to reporting on President Bush, without once providing an article explaining the reasons for the editorial decision to begin calling the president "George Bush" rather than "Bill Clinton." *
And you cannot change your positions like a child who wants his cookie to always conclude, "Therefore, we should have our cookie, and our cookie is named Barack Hussein Obama."
* Often I skip stories believing they're adequately covered in the news or on talk radio or on other blogs. But this is just a blog with a few cobloggers.
Does the MSM now take that position as well -- that they assume that all the information they're deliberately withholding from the public will be provided to them by alternative sources? Do newspapers now freely admit they are incomplete by design, even when it comes to watershed events like victory in a foreign war?
Does the MSM now assume that it will be supplemented by blogs and talk radio, thus freeing them from reporting on distasteful subjects like American military victories?
For Example: Chris Matthews has gone from war-cannot-be-won to war-cannot-be-lost overnight, apparently, assuming this as background information which shapes his opinion that... the victory in Iraq benefits Barack Obama.
I don't mind that analysis per se. But just last week Chris Matthews was claiming the surge had not worked at all. Repeatedly. Now it's worked so well we've won the war, and thus the world is made safe for President Barack Hussein Obama.