In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.

Have you been hitting the cooking sherry again Fred?

I have been reading the comments of guys like Fredo (please protect the don at the fruit stand, Fredo) for so long it doesn't phase me...but Ed at Captain's Quarters is usually a great guy. And the NRO is not such a bad place. Have we all gone soft in the head?

THIS is my place to hang out...with CY, as a general rule. (I am a card carrying member of the VDH fan club, and I suffer from unrequited [and unrecognized] infatuation with Atlas Shrugs drop dead gorgeous blogger, but I hang here more than anywhere else)

But, I believe there are some outstanding places to visit daily. LGF, Instapundit, Michelle, ...a few others.

And Captain's Quarters is certainly one of them. But in discussing Lowry above...I am not on all fours with Ed...or Lowry.

The gist of what I'm getting is that the Ministry of Media "ain't so bad" and there's "lots of good" that comes out of them.

To my ear, this sounds akin to saying, "Well, you know...John Wayne Gacy DID play a nice clown at kids birthday parties...so don't look at all those decaying bodies in the crawlspace"

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Let me get this straight.

We get 40 years of leftist spin, and I mean hard, fast, dramamine requiring spin...and we should lay down and take a "well, boys will be boys" attitude about it? And if we don't adopt that attitude, we're being "unreasonable" about it all??????

The Ministry of Media in all their branches,....print, network news, international news, wire services...have been distorting, manipulating, staging and obscuring the facts since (at least) Walter Cronkite and the Tet offensive. They regularly slander America and Israel.

What IS said by them needs to be decoded... as much as what is NOT said needs to be excavated like an archealogical dig.

And we "shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water". That "baby" is 40 years old and her name is Typhoid Mary. She's diseased and what is worse...she thinks she's the Queen of Sheba. And we are all her subjects.

I, for one...am damn tired of their smug and pedantic attitude, their institutional arrogance, their haughty refusal at self-policing...hell, at objective self-reflection. And at their Code of Silence and coverup schemes.

Let me make this point crystal clear, there should be no NEED for bloggers to "uncover" photoshopped pictures, staged scenes, phony sources, dummied up documents and withheld evidence.

The information stream is a de facto public trust...and whether Mr. Lowry or Mr. Rago wish to denigrate the blogosphere for any of their own self-serving interests or not....LGF, Ed, Michelle, Bob Owens, Glenn, Patterico, etc...have moved mountains (of BS) that we would otherwise be forced to swallow,.... with little or no ability to gain more than "caricatures of truth" from the information stream that has allowed itself to become a political arm of the left.

We should get down on our knees every day and thank the heavens for the men and women of the blogosphere...because the Ministry of Media not only has shown it can't be trusted with our facts, evidence and information...it has shown itself to be quite willing to do the bidding of those who stand against us.

If Mr. Lowry and Mr. Rago can't come to grips with THAT...then I'm not sure if they first need an optometrist for myopia or perhaps a proctologist first to gain access to their failing eyesight.

So the character "Jamil Hussein" may or may not be based on a real person, just as the "news" AP reports may or may not be based on real events.

I am sick and tired of seeing the same straw man defense over and over again. If I hear one more apologist tell me about how this is not about Jamil Hussein, that this is about the reality of conditions on the ground in Iraq, and then proceed to go through a laundry list of examples of how bad Iraq is, I am seriously going to lose it! YES, THIS IS ALL ABOUT JAMIL HUSSSEIN! This IS all about six immolated Sunnis.

Integrity is like virginity. Easy to lose hard to regain. AP should keep this in mind...

Does anyone remember the scene in Ghostbusters, where it was finally discovered that the oozing river of slime fed off negative energy?

Meet Eric Boehlert...the oozing river of slime personified.

That thought crossed my mind as I watched Anchoress, Allahpundit, and SeeDubya have to ward off being slimed by the oozings of yet another of Eric Boehlert's gasbag bloviations.

It's clear that this walking mindfart has never taken a class in debate, argumentation, persuasion, logic or clearly... journalism. Even more clearly, the classes he perhaps may have taken in ethics, were taught by his mentors in the Ministry of Media, for whom he is now interning as a junior grade apologist. They are not recognizable as "ethics" in the real world, but to leftist media apologists, the rules in a world of slime are...fluid.

Since he is wholly incapable of making an argument, he bubbles up some slime through misquotes, misstatement of facts, misuse of evidence, and missed opportunities at not soiling his little tantrum-throwing diapers any further than he already has.

While certainly a few Iowa farms might make use of his ability to create phantom strawmen out of thin air, there are virtually zero other uses for his fatuous and empty scribbles as he tries....in vain...to put a new coat of paint to cover over the gaping hole in the Ministry of Media's vermin infested sitting room. It's the wrong technique for the misidentified problems.

And his paint can, of course, is simply more green, bubbling slime. He blames "warbloggers",(there is no definition of who this is...or isn't...but, it follows neatly into the thumb-sucking tantrum of the puerile left, if you don't agree with the leftists, you are a warmongerer...among their other favorite tantrum throwing names hurled at non-leftists, ie, See, homophobic, racist, money-grubbing etc.)...and this "blame" in today's tantrum... is that some Iraqi journalists have been killed and the assignment is dangerous...and we don't care.

Hmmm....and we don't care. Interesting. And, since we don't care, therefore...we don't believe any of the leftists are telling the truth. And because some died, ALL journalists there are telling the truth. And ALL the reports are therefore accurate. Interesting. Stupid...but fascinating to watch unfold.

Let's put this in leftist syllogism form:

"A" is a journalist who uses fake sources, dummies up documents, photoshops photos, distorts facts, stages phony scenes;

"B" is a journalist who died in a war zone

Ergo, journalist "B" PROVES that journalist "A" is not something to discuss, and anyone who does deserves to be slimed.

Um....ok.

What this asshelmet chooses to ignore, while lying about ...well, virtually everything...is that LYING about facts, evidence, sources, research,photographs, ....IS the point.

It's not ok to create phony stories to advance the media's political agenda. Period.

Since this oozing river of slime feeds off negative energy, I'm going to wish him Happy Holidays anyway. And hope that his New Year's resolution is to find somewhere within him between now and then...a conscience. Some honor. Some dignity. A sense of right and wrong. I don't do this just for him...but for all of us...so that we don't risk being slimed in 2007 nearly as badly as we have been for the last 40 years.