Please Everyone! Just Give Up!

I can't get over the impression that Howard Fineman is encouraging us to throw in the towel in Iraq. He recounts how the press managed to turn a victory in Vietnam into a defeat by highlighting the negative and ignoring the negative and wants the press to accomplish the same thing in Iraq.

"[T]he cause of the president's decline is the drumbeat of bad news out of Iraq, which continues to provide images that defy the White House story line. To be sure, there is good news from that ancient land: re-opened schools, electricity working, a remarkable (for the Islamic world) provisional constitution with guarantees of free speech, religion and assembly. Were Iraq to become a stable, democratic state, it would be hard to argue that America was not safer as a result. A big country with vast oil reserves to bankroll terrorists in the middle of an antagonistic region would be off the enemies list.

But in politics as in life a picture is worth a thousand words, and videotape is worth millions."

The pictures scared Clinton out of Somalia in just 4 days.

Meanwhile, our own press seems hard pressed to even call the terrorists something as benign as "insurgents."

"BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Suspected insurgents killed four American civilian contractors in a grenade attack Wednesday in central Iraq, U.S. officials said.

Cheering residents in Fallujah pulled charred bodies from burning vehicles and hung them from a Euphrates River bridge."


Someone should remind these pigs that Saddam would have just gassed them all.