As we reported last night, the WaPo read yesterday like a Red State Rascals update. No so the NY Times. They managed to "miss" the story of Lt. Michael Murphy, a New Yorker (Long Island) who will be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Pete Hegseth from The Tank hits the nail on the head: I applaud The Washington Post for taking an objective look at the situation on the ground, and reporting the facts. I wish the same could be said for its counterpart further north along the eastern seaboard: The New York Times. On Thursday, the United States Navy announced that Lieutenant Michael ...

While the major media blared headlines about retired Lt. Gen. Sanchez's comments about Iraq being a "nightmare", they conveniently failed to report his comments about their coverage of the war resulted in some of our troops being killed: Sanchez: Media's Reporting of Iraq War Endangered Soldiers' Lives Sunday, October 14, 2007 WASHINGTON — The former top commander of coalition forces in Iraq may have called U.S. efforts there catastrophically flawed and unrealistically optimistic, but much of the criticism of the media by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez has been left unreported. In his speech to the Military Reporters and Editors Association in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Sanchez accused reporters of "unscrupulous reporting, solely focused on supporting an agenda and preconceived notions of the U.S. ...

Much has been made in the press today about a U. S. airstrike that resulted in the deaths of some innocent Iraqi women and children. A tragedy to be sure. May God comfort their families. But this tragedy was an aberration for U. S. forces which have been following strict rules of engagement. Why the rules? So we don't kill innocent women and children. We want to kill the bad guys--which we did, by the way: 19 insurgents killed--apparrently while hiding behind the skirts of women. Nonetheless, the U.S. issued a statement expressing regret and launched an investigation into the deaths. Now, contrast today's U.S. airstrike with the standard operating procedure of ...

From our military and economics expert, Scott, a few reflections on economics and the failure of liberal talk radio: I love economics.  Understanding economics is one excellent way to reveal truth that can remain hidden without an understanding of economics.  For example, some people may  persuade you through their words that they care deeply about a particular issue (Take Al Gore and global warming for example), but there is no better way to uncover what people truly value than by observing how they allocate their money.  (That same Al Gore owns a house that consumes 12 times the electricity of the average Nashville home). ...

The media template: good news out of Iraq does "not necessarily" need to be reported.  Bad news, of course, does. Here is an amazing exchange between Howard Kurtz of CNN's "Reliable Sources" and Robin Wright of the Washington Post. After stating that the media has pounced on the bad news, Kurtz wonders why the MSM has ignored the last several months of good news. Kurtz asked, "Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?" Not necessarily. The fact is we're at the beginning of a trend -- and it's not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths ...

Chris Matthews made some stunning comments about the Bush administration last week. The next day he was interviewed by Jon Stewart--no friend of the Bush administration--who proceeded to eviscerate the theme of Matthew's new book, "Life is a Campaign." Matthews doesn't like being the quarry:

Cox and Forkum make a great point: the countless stories of valor and courage are ignored by the national press while the "bad news" from Iraq is trumpeted. What agenda? To read about the latest hero, click here. Minnesota Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Chad Malmberg Outnumbered by almost two to one, an ambush closing in like a vice, more than a thousand rounds raining down for 50 minutes – the chances of success, much less survival, might seem impossible. But for Staff Sgt. Chad Malmberg of the Minnesota Army National Guard’s 34th Infantry Division, the day he and his men faced ...

National Public Radio would normally love to air a feature story focusing on the anniversary of school desegregation in Little Rock. NPR would normally love to have one of the country's best black journalists conduct such an interview. But NPR passed on the offer--because the interviewee was George W. Bush. (H/T Instapundit.com) NPR Rebuffs White House On Bush Talk Radio Network Wanted To Choose Its Interviewer By Howard Kurtz The White House reached out to National Public Radio over the weekend, offering analyst Juan Williams a presidential interview to mark yesterday's 50th anniversary of school desegregation in Little Rock. But NPR turned down the interview, and Williams's ...

In the run-up to the President's speech last week, I was (forgive me) watching Keith Olbermann on MSNBC--which probably doubled his ratings for the evening. It was a spectacle. He could not foment fast enough. It was a rip-roaring, raucous hour of hammering the Leader of the Free World on what he had not yet said about Iraq. Why wait? I was not surprised by anything he said about the President. But I was perplexed when he turned to Gen. David Petraeus and spewed the following: that Admiral William Fallon allegedly said of Gen. Petraeus that he was “an *ss-kissing little chicken-sh*t.” Here's the excerpt from the transcript: OLBERMANN: Despite the rosy picture painted tonight by Mr. Bush, at the Pentagon, there is sharp disagreement about how to proceed from here. Remarkably, the loudest protests coming from the man who is, at least for the moment, General Petraeus‘ superior, Admiral William Fallon. Admiral William Fallon, chief of Central Command, of CENTCOM, having reportedly derided General Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March. The admiral telling the general, reportedly, again, saying he was a blank-kissing little chicken blank. That comment, Petraeus‘ reward for making remarks Fallon interpreted as Petraeus trying to ingratiate himself with a superior. The admirable apparently hates that. That proved too much. And Hugh Hewitt reports that it is: The lefties at the Daily Kos and Think Progress are both giving a lot of play to the following quote that Admiral William Fallon allegedly (much more on that in a bit) made about his underling David Petraeus during their first meeting in Baghdad last March. The Daily Kos and Think Progress report Fallon called Petraeus “an *ss-kissing little chicken-sh*t.” I know what you’re thinking. For reputable outfits like the Daily Kos and Think Progress to report such an incendiary comment, the remark must be impeccably sourced. Well…

The Wall Street Journal picks up on what most of the media is not reporting this morning. --When the Iraqi government puts its cell phone spectrum up for auction, it netted a better-than-expected sum of nearly $4 billion --At a recent conference in Dubai hundreds of Iraqi businessmen met an equal number of foreign investors newly interested in acquiring shares of business in Iraq --Iraqi oil is now flowing out of the country via Turkish pipelines --The International Monetary Fund predicts economic growth for Iraq of 6% this year. Huh? Petraeus Takes the Beltway September 12, 2007; Page A18 So the two men best qualified to give an honest and comprehensive account of events in Iraq have marched through Congress to say -- and show -- that the surge is working and America's goals are still within reach. Yet it's a sign of the U.S. political debate that their evidence of progress seemed to make the headlines in none of our leading news sources yesterday. Instead, the "news" seems to be that General David Petraeus has recommended that some 5,000 U.S. troops can rotate out of Iraq by the end of this year, and that U.S. forces might be able to return to pre-surge levels by next July if progress continues. That's no small matter, but it obscures the larger message of the testimony by the General and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. To wit: The U.S. is gaining ground in Iraq -- often in the least expected of ways. Consider some excerpts from Mr. Crocker's testimony. The Iraqi government puts its cell phone spectrum up for auction: It nets a better-than-expected sum of nearly $4 billion. At a recent conference in Dubai, "hundreds of Iraqi businessmen met an equal number of foreign investors newly interested in acquiring shares of business in Iraq." Iraqi oil is now flowing out of the country via Turkish pipelines, and the International Monetary Fund predicts economic growth for Iraq of 6% this year. In the vicinity of Abu Ghraib, 1,700 men -- many of them former Sunni insurgents -- have joined the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Security Forces. The Iraqi government is quietly offering jobs or retirement packages to thousands of former soldiers, many of them one-time members of the Baath Party. Significantly, it is doing so without taking the politically sensitive steps of declaring a general amnesty or enacting legislation on de-Baathification. As Mr. Crocker notes, these developments "are neither measured in benchmarks nor visible to those far from Baghdad." It's a point that seems to have been missed by Democrats on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, as well as by such Republicans as John Warner and Dick Lugar. Their collective view seems to be that Iraq is a lost cause because the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has failed to achieve "national reconciliation," on the grounds that a series of legislative benchmarks have still not been met. We don't know anyone who opposes "national reconciliation," though perhaps only on Capitol Hill would it be measured by the quantity of legislation passed rather than the quality of life for ordinary Iraqis. (In the U.S., these measures tend to be inversely correlated.) Yet "reconciliation" isn't something that precedes basic security. It follows from it. In his testimony, General Petraeus noted that violent civilian deaths have declined by 45% in Iraq and 70% in Baghdad. Car and suicide bombings are down by nearly 50% since March, another astonishing turnabout. Here, too, the good news comes from the least expected of places: Anbar province, where Sunni tribal leaders and many former insurgents have realized their best interests lie with the U.S. and a democratic Iraqi government in which they have a say, and not with al Qaeda. Critics claim this realization has nothing to do with the surge, but surely the tribal sheikhs would not risk fighting al Qaeda unless they believed the U.S. and Iraqi government had shown the will to stay and prevail.