The Other Club has complained recently about the news coverage of battles in Afghanistan, here and here. This is because the reportage is obviously either incompetent or anti-American. Whichever, this slant is chronic and, with interminable repetition, has had its effects on a population who are mostly strangers to history and economics.
The war is inconvenient for the PNB press because they mostly think George Bush is abominable, so they will hype anything that damages him. Whether it is conscious or unconscious does not matter.
George Bush has been preserved in office only because of his prosecution of the war. His other policies have engendered as big, or bigger, government than his opponents imagined. George Bush was re-elected because a slight majority of Americans can still recognize bullshit when they are waist deep in it.
John Kerry’s lies about American troops in in the 70s, his prevarications about his medals, his inability to take a coherent position and his desire to subjugate American foreign policy to France resulted in his defeat. The only surprise is that it was not a landslide. That would have required chest deep bullshit.
There was a time when a liberal could seemingly be trusted with the defense of the country. Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, for example, have reputations – deserved or not – in that regard. They all conducted major wars wherein American military casualties vastly exceeded those in the War against Islamofascism. American civilian casualties are a different story.
Those civilian dead are a sufficient, if not primary, reason that Democrats who have aspired to the presidency since LBJ – George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Hillary Clinton, for example, can no longer inspire confidence regarding foreign policy.
American voters recognized this in 2004, and that has the extreme left foaming at the mouth. They believe that were it not for a combination of Islamofascists who’d like to slit our throats, and red-state-neck American morons, John Kerry might have been president.
The war is an inconvenient obstacle to dreams of a socialist utopia. Lacking a war, George Bush is certainly no such obstacle. He presided over the largest increase in entitlement spending in our history. So why such acrimony from the Democrat base over a war Democrats voted, on the evidence, to support? It puts Democrats in a bind.
The party’s natural constituency (those who vote in primaries) is a motley blend of ANSWER, ACORN, democratunderground and MoveOn types. Those extreme-left interests have an overweighted effect on the Democrats. “Bush derangement syndrome” has ballooned into opposition at any cost. Mort Kondracke makes the case for why the disloyal opposition has become so dangerous.
Returning to the issue with which we opened, part of the problem is the ideological complicity of the PNB press. Here are three further examples:
About Afghanistan -From Instapundit:
…the news reports, rather exaggerated to begin with, are of the form “Dozens killed in renewed fighting,” without mentioning that most of those killed are people who should be killed.
About Bin-Laden and Gitmo – From Captain’s Quarters; What The AP Discarded:
And finally, a view of how the outrageous becomes normal and uninteresting via repitition – From Victor Davis Hanson; Eye of the Beholder:
War-torn Iraq has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California perhaps now 35 million. The former is a violent and impoverished landscape, the latter said to be paradise on Earth. But how you envision either place to some degree depends on the eye of the beholder and is predicated on what the daily media appear to make of each…
Words matter. The PNB press know it.