GOP Plays the Media and Dems Like a Fiddle

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

The Senate voted Thursday to condemn an advertisement by the liberal anti-war group MoveOn.org that accused the top military commander in Iraq of betrayal.

The 72-25 vote condemned the full-page ad that appeared in The New York Times last week as Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, testified on Capitol Hill. The ad was headlined: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us? Cooking the books for the White House."

The ad became a life raft for the Republican party as the war debate kicked into high gear. With several Republicans opposed to President Bush's war strategy, GOP members were able to put aside their differences and rally around their disapproval of the ad.

Holy freaking hell. Here's what matters: whether or not the freaking surge is working. Here's what we're talking about: a newspaper ad by MoveOn.org.

There is no liberal media. If there were a liberal media, we'd be talking about, you know, how the surge isn't freaking working. The GAO says so. The National Intelligence Estimate says so. 90% of the Iraqi people say so. George Will says so. 70% of the American people say so. Virtually the only people left who don't say so report directly to George Bush.

Petraeus was given an impossible task and of course he's going to put the best possible spin on it. What's he going to say? "No, sir. The job's too hard? I can't do it?"

And it's not like he has an unimpeachable nonpartisan history of speaking the truth. Here's what he said in 2004 on Charlie Rose:

But what I would say is that there has been enormous progress just in the seven or eight months that we've actually been recruiting, training, equipping and employing Iraqi security forces. Huge progress.

And see this op-ed by former Reagan defense official Lawrence J. Korb:

On Sept. 26, 2004, about six weeks before the presidential election, in which the deteriorating situation in Iraq was an increasingly important issue, then Lt. Gen. Petraeus published a misleading commentary in the Washington Post. In that article, Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces, spoke glowingly about the tangible progress that those forces were making under his tutelage. According to Petraeus, more than 200,000 Iraqis were performing a wide variety of security missions; training was on track and increasing in capacity; 45 Iraqi National Guard battalions and six regular Army battalions were conducting operations on a daily basis; and by the end of November 2004, six more regular Army battalions and six additional Intervention Force battalions would become operational.

Because Bush administration policy at that time was that "we will stand down when they stand up," this article, in effect, conveyed to the American electorate that the Iraqis were, indeed, standing up, and, therefore, there was light at the end of the tunnel for the Iraqi quagmire.

If Petraeus wrote on his own initiative, he was injecting himself improperly into a political campaign. If he was encouraged or even allowed to do this by his civilian superiors, he was allowing himself to be used for partisan political purposes.

...

Was Gen. William Westmoreland ever objective about the attrition strategy in Vietnam or Gen. Douglas MacArthur about the Chinese intervention in Korea?

Sure calling him "General Betray Us" is out of line. But how did that become the whole freaking story? What in the world were the Democrats thinking going along with this idiotic Senate condemnation? (Clinton and Dodd voted against it; Obama didn't vote.)

Was there a whole media firestorm when Ann Coulter wrote a book that basically called every liberal who ever lived a traitor? (The book was called Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.) Did the Senate vote to condemn Sean Hannity's book Deliver Us from Evil : Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism?

What a freaking crock. Go to hell, media.