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

The media that wants to lose in Iraq

John Leo:

In a burst of anti-war triumphalism, Harold Meyerson of The Washington Post wrote last week that President Bush and the Bushies have run out of "elitists whom they can demonize." Hmmm. That is a problem. Where will we find the punching bags of tomorrow? Wait! I have it. How about the elite news media? Will they do?

Meyerson celebrated Cindy Sheehan, "whose down-the-line dovishness is more than offset by her standing as the mother of," etc., etc. Actually, Sheehan was more or less a summer-long anti-Bush media construct, kept aloft by withholding the news that she regards "insurgents" in Iraq as "freedom fighters," hates her country (America "is not worth dying for") and thinks Lynne Stewart, the lawyer convicted of aiding terrorists, is a real-life Atticus Finch, the heroic attorney of "To Kill a Mockingbird." She's a loony Michael Moore clone, protected by the media's "bereaved mom" image.

The major papers pulled all of our strings with stories, mostly played big on Page One, about the 2,000th American soldier killed in Iraq. Every military death is a tragedy, but more than 58,000 died in Vietnam and almost 7,000 in a single World War II battle, Iwo Jima, all without front-page anti-war articles posing as compassionate news stories.

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When President Bush belatedly responded to his critics, The Washington Post ran the story as "Bush Spars With Critics of the War; Exchanges With Democrats Take Campaign-Style Tone." The Power Line blog got it right: "A non-partisan paper would headline the story of Bush's defense of the integrity of his administration by saying something like 'Bush responds to critics' ... But The Washington Post isn't non-partisan ... So it tries to make the president sound like he's engaging in partisan quibbling rather than finally responding to charges which, in their strongest form, cast him as one of the great villains in American history."

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Can it be that many national reporters are so afflicted by Bush hatred that they can't let go long enough to report stories straight? Could be. Consider the entire backward-looking thrust of so much reportage, focusing sharply on what happened in 2002 and 2003, less on the stake we have in prevailing in Iraq. If we lose in Iraq, it will be the first great victory for global jihad, with tremendous consequences for the United States. Can the media get over their obsession with Bush and focus on that?