Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The media double standard

Brent bozell:

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But there's more to this double-standard story. While NBC aired 58 stories on U.S. prison abuse in the first few weeks of that story, NBC aired only five stories over 16 months on the discovery of Saddam's mass graves. Abu Ghraib holds 1,500 prisoners, a fraction of whom were abused. Saddam's graves held as many as 300,000 people, all of whom were murdered. How is Abu Ghraib 10 times more important than that?

Sadly, the distortions continued. With few exceptions, the Berg beheading was at best a two-day TV story, an obstacle to get around, a white-noise distraction from The Scandal. Berg died. The media's take: sad, but so what? That shouldn't register in public opinion. On the very night the Berg story emerged, ABC's "Nightline" couldn't spend more than a few minutes on Berg before Ted Koppel was back to soliciting John McCain to explain what horrific treatment Americans might dish out next.

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One wishes Rather had not skipped the other salient points about the CBS poll. By 57 to 37 percent, Americans surveyed didn't want any more prison abuse pictures to be released. And 49 percent said the media have spent too much time on the prison abuse story, compared to a mere 6 percent who think it's been undercovered. Not only were those poll results not aired, they don't seem to have caused anyone to put the brakes on the careening Abu Ghraib Express.

The exit strategy nonsense

Tony Blankley:

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Nitwit pundits and Sunday morning television sages, with that fake look of thoughtfulness that is their trademark, talk about an exit strategy -- as if it were just one more Mapquest printout. But any such exit strategy will lead us only on a short path to hell. That is because the essential strategic element in war is to defeat the enemy's will to win, and accepting anything less than triumph in Iraq will catastrophically embolden the terrorists.

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We have the strength -- military, economic, cultural, diplomatic (dare I include the strength of our religious faith, also?) -- to persist around the world unto victory -- for generations if necessary.

But all this potential capacity for victory can only be brought into full being by a sustained act of collective will. It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently -- although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)

But even the president's opponents are not our greatest peril at the moment. The greatest immediate potential danger is a slackening of presidential resolve. President Bush must not hesitate to take all actions with as much force as needed to more fully impose our will in Iraq.

He should not listen to his political advisers -- but to his own sound instincts. If he does his bold best in Iraq, the election will take care of itself. America, with the president in the saddle, must re-emerge as the strong horse in the Middle East that bin Laden so fears.