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

Rallying around Newsweak

Belmont Club:

Glenn Reynolds notes that the New York Times coverage of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan may not really be about prisoner abuse or even Afghanistan, but about maintaining the prestige of Newsweek. He calls it "circling the wagons", the idea being to teach press critics an object lesson in how expensive it is to humiliate the mass media by catching them at sloppy reporting by flooding the zone with stories similar to the one which was discredited . That may or may not be the case, but it is nearly undeniable that the effect of the media's coverage of American misdeeds has been to make the slightest infraction against enemy combatants ruinously expensive. Not only the treatment of the enemy combatants themselves, but their articles of religious worship have become the subject of such scrutiny that Korans must handled with actual gloves in a ceremonial fashion, a fact that must be triumph for the jihadi cause in and of itself. While nothing is wrong with ensuring the proper treatment of enemy prisoners, the implicit moral superiority that has been accorded America's enemy and his effects recalls Rudyard Kipling's The Grave of the Hundred Dead.

You know the mainstream media is pretty desperate when they start quoting Ann Coulter. Since Stephens, AR only cable operation only carries CNN, I had to watch Anderson Cooper's discussion on the issue, where he quoted Ann as saying "News magazines do not kill people, Muslims do." To Cooper this is the best comment he had heard on the subject.

I also got to see Cooper express the "isn't it awful that we are showing Saddam in his tighty whiteys," anxiety over what the crazies in the middle east will do over seeing the images, along with the "Isn't it awful" sound bite from some man on the street in Baghdad. He did note that Al Jazeera thought the images were too awful to show on their network.

After five days with CNN as the only news channel to watch, I have a bettter understanding of why Fox is beating them soundly in the ratings. The "Capitol Gang" on Saturday was pathetic. Kate O'Beirn was the sole voice of reason. Mark Shields is still peddling the mislead us into war Democrat talking points. For Mark's benefit, in case he Googles his name and finds this post, Saddam was required under the terms of a cease fire agreement and several UN resolutions to account for his WMD. He was never able to do so as even Hans Blix admitted. Because he could not account for them and it was believed to be an unreasonable risk to take his word on whether they were destroyed, we went to war and liberated Iraq. Unfortunately, after the war we still could not account for all of Saddam's WMD. I would remind Shields that absense of evidence is not evidence of absense. The reports on the search for the weapons after the war was left to speculate on what happened to them becuase their was a lack of evidence as to their destruction.