If You Only Had One Question By: Mark W Adams

to ask the White House Press Secretary, would you waste it by lobbing a softball like this?

Why, are you allowing the U.S. press and the international press downplay all the good things that have happened in Iraq?

Rosemary Esmay

(Full audio here. Rose is the last questioner at 42 minutes in.)

Rose, since you were at the end of the questioners, you might have been at a loss for a fresh questions, and you were between diapers. I wish I had got this article by the very conservative Max Boot to you before you embarassed yourself.

The media aren't the enemy in Iraq
Blaming the press for the problems in Iraq deflects the blame from where it belongs.

IF WE WIND UP losing the war in Iraq, as now appears likely (though not inevitable), many conservatives know who to blame: the press, or, in blogger-speak, the MSM (mainstream news media). Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America's valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.

[snip]

Whatever the shortcomings of some reporting, there has been a lot of first-rate coverage by a heroic corps of correspondents that has persevered in the face of terrible danger. (At least 109 journalists have been killed and many others wounded or kidnapped, making this the deadliest conflict on record for the Fourth Estate.) I am thinking of reporters such as John Burns, Dexter Filkins and Michael Gordon of the New York Times; Greg Jaffe and Michael Philips of the Wall Street Journal; Tom Ricks of the Washington Post; Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times and former Times reporter John Daniszewski; Sean Naylor of Army Times; Bing West and Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly; and George Packer of the New Yorker. They've risked their necks to get the truth — and not, as Rumsfeld suggested, by flying over Iraq.

If you wanted to figure out what was happening over the last four years, you would have been infinitely better off paying attention to their writing than to what the president or his top generals were saying. If we fail to achieve our goals in Iraq — which the administration defines as a "unified, stable, democratic and secure nation" — it won't be the fault of the ink-stained wretches or even their blow-dried TV counterparts. To argue otherwise deflects blame from those who deserve it, in the upper echelons of the administration and the armed forces. Perhaps that's the point.

Nice softball Rose. I shouldn't have expected better.

And don't forget, Weekly Standard contributor Max Boot is no lib and has supported the administration from the get-go, a real neo-con's neo con.

Bottom line Rose my dear, is that there's not one damn thing Tony or the White House can to stop the international press, US press, or anyone else, from "downplaying all the good things happening in Iraq." They are writing, reporting, and opining what they see, hear and think.

Nothing, NOT. ONE. THING. can mitigate the daily carnage except the end of the carnage. I don't know what it will take for you to understand that. The Administration loves to pound security here, that it trumps everything here, and yet you want to try and gloss over the complete absence of security there with stories of new schools being built? A new hospital wing dedication? (It better be a Shi'ite hospital because the Sunni ones don't get any supplies from the Shi'ite run Ministry of Health and the others are run by the Mehdi Army Militia.)

You're side is completely unserious about this world, and don't even know it. Five years after the 9/11 commission, and it took the dems to pass the Anti-Terrorism bill.

What Snow could to, what he can control and is ultimately responsible for, is the series of Snow jobs, delusional fantasies, and non-credible official statements that they've issued as official statements of the administration.

No, instead of asking why their credibility is so low, you give him yet another way to blame the living hell we created on anyone else but the Decider.

Nice. You should get a medal.