That’s right.

Columnist Mona Charen (also an author I love to read) tells it spot on:

Arguably violating its embed agreement, the near universal press practice since 9/11, and the expressed wishes of the family, the Associated Press went ahead and published a photograph of mortally wounded Marine Lance Corporal Joshua “Bernie” Bernard, killed in action in Afghanistan. The AP also ignored the pleas of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had implored the press agency as a “matter of judgment and common decency” not to publish the photo.

This is one of the reasons I have always had a bad taste in my mouth at the idea of “embedding” these lefty “journalists” among our brave troops in combat zones.

They are nothing but a bunch of feckless assholes with a political agenda that takes the place of things like good sense, tastful sensibilities and patriotism.

Bernard, 21, a devout Christian and Iraq War veteran from Maine, was described by his squad leader as “a true-heartedly very good guy . . . probably one of the best guys I’ve known in my entire life.” Bernard served as his unit’s point man and navigator. He lost his life on August 14 when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that blew off one leg and badly mangled the other. The AP photo captured Bernard lying on the ground, two buddies attempting to help — a splash of red where one leg had been.

The AP’s justification of its decision is both pompous and dubious. “Images of U.S. soldiers fallen in combat have been rare in Iraq and Afghanistan, partly because it is unusual for journalists to witness them and partly because military guidelines have barred the showing of photographs until after families have been notified.” AP says it waited until after Bernard’s funeral to publish the photo, but the same could have been done before. There must have been hundreds of mortal injuries and deaths captured on camera by war correspondents since 2001.

Arguably violating its embed agreement, the near-universal press practice since 9/11, and the express wishes of the family, the Associated Press went ahead and published a photograph of mortally wounded Marine Lance Corporal Joshua “Bernie” Bernard, killed in action in Afghanistan. The AP also ignored the pleas of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had implored the press agency as a “matter of judgment and common decency” not to publish the photo.

Bernard, 21, a devout Christian and Iraq War veteran from Maine, was described by his squad leader as “a true-heartedly very good guy . . . probably one of the best guys I’ve known in my entire life.” Bernard served as his unit’s point man and navigator. He lost his life on August 14 when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that blew off one leg and badly mangled the other. The AP photo captured Bernard lying on the ground, two buddies attempting to help — a splash of red where one leg had been.

The AP’s justification of its decision is both pompous and dubious. “Images of U.S. soldiers fallen in combat have been rare in Iraq and Afghanistan, partly because it is unusual for journalists to witness them and partly because military guidelines have barred the showing of photographs until after families have been notified.” AP says it waited until after Bernard’s funeral to publish the photo, but the same could have been done before. There must have been hundreds of mortal injuries and deaths captured on camera by war correspondents since 2001.

The AP contends on the one hand that “the stories and photos” of Lance Corporal Bernard “conform with military regulations surrounding journalists embedded with U.S. forces” but then reminds us that “Critics . . . maintain some of the rules are aimed at sanitizing the war, minimizing the sacrifice and cruelty which were graphically depicted by images from the Civil War to Vietnam where such restrictions were not in place.” Which is it? Is the AP defying the embed agreement because they are no longer willing to “sanitize” the war, or are they simply publishing the first dead Marine photo they’ve ever laid hands on?

“AP journalists document world events every day,” the statement continued. “Afghanistan is no exception. We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is.”

Right, sure. These mainstream media pukes are so transparent when they bullshit that all it does is help you realize how little they respect our intelligence.

There is something else that the AP perhaps did not consider. While for them a photo of a mortally wounded Marine is testimony to the brutality of war; and while for the family it is “disrespectful” (the father’s word); to America’s enemies it is a triumph. There are no universal standards. Our enemies are known to carry videos of the beheading of Nicholas Berg on their cell phones. And for those who’ve forgotten, Nick Berg was a completely innocent American noncombatant. Joshua Bernard would want to be remembered as he lived and served. Instead, the photo of his last moments will doubtless go viral on Islamist websites, where his suffering will be exulted over.

Why should that worry the AP? They are far left liberals, so anything that will help the enemy that they can explain away as “legal and acceptable” is all they need.

Like the NYT, AP, the alphabet networks, L.A.T., WaPO, CNN and the rest of that crowd are the nearest thing to traitors any news media can get without being prosecuted for treason.

‘Nough said, my blood’s boiling more than it needs to!

Read the column in its entirety.

There’s no other way to describe the majority of today’s journalists. If I were a reporter, I don’t think I’d be able to tell anyone about it and look them in the eye at the same time.

Chuck here, by the way, still having a problem with the dropdown contributor menu.

This piece from the Media Research Center says it all.

With President Obama and congressional liberals facing loud protests over their big government health care plan, journalists are casting the anti-ObamaCare forces as “ugly,” “unruly,” “nasty” mobs, with reporters presenting the most odious images (like pictures of Obama drawn as Hitler) as somehow representative. But when President George W. Bush faced left-wing protests, the media scrubbed their stories of radical voices and depicted demonstrators as mainstream, and even “prescient.”

In January 2003, all of the broadcast networks touted an anti-war march organized by the radical International ANSWER, an outgrowth of the communist Workers World Party. Signs at the rally read: “USA Is #1 Terrorist,” “Bush Is a Terrorist,” and “The NYPD Are Terrorists Too.” National Review Online quoted several protesters who claimed 9/11 was a Bush plot, “like when Hitler burned down the Reichstag,” and argued Bush would “build a worldwide planetary death machine.”

Bush would “build a worldwide planetary death machine.”

Come on, now, is that quotably sourced from a mature mind?

Regardless,

Reporters bypassed all that hate and showcased the protesters as everyday Americans. On ABC, Bill Blakemore stressed how the protest attracted “Democrats and Republicans, many middle-aged, from all walks of life,” while CBS’s Joie Chen saw “young, old, veterans and veteran activists — all united in the effort to stop the war before it starts.”

In Feburary 2003, CNN donated two hours of programming, “Voices of Dissent,” to another International ANSWER event. Correspondent Maria Hinojosa enthused: “It’s an extraordinarily diverse crowd. I have seen elderly men and women with mink coats carrying their posters.” ABC’s John McKenzie painted the protesters as idealistic: “So many voices, filling the streets, struggling to be heard.”

Is that the best a supposedly responsible, fair and balanced media can do in the way of reporting, or were they just having a bad news day or several?

On March 22, 2003, CNN offered 38 separate reports on a demonstration that day, but managed to never show any of the radical rhetoric from the podium. Over on ABC, Chris Cuomo saluted the leftists converging in New York City: “While protesters like today are a statistical minority, in American history protests like this have been prescient indicators of the national mood. So the government may do well to listen to what’s said today.”

In October 2003, the far left rallied again in Washington, this time with a rapper leading a chant of “F**k George Bush!” and speakers praising Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The next day’s Washington Post ignored all of that in favor of a soft feature: “In D.C., a Diverse Mix Rouses War Protest.”

In D.C., a Diverse Mix Rouses War Protest.

I believe the correct response to that, in computerese, is LMFAO!!!!

In 2006, the left demanded money for New Orleans, with one protester wearing a George W. Bush mask adorned with Satan horns and a Hitler moustache. CNN reporter Susan Roesgen thought it comic, calling it a “look-alike” for the President. But covering the anti-big government tea parties in April 2009, Roesgen was aggrieved to see a picture of Obama with a Hitler moustache: “Why be so hard on the President of the United States though with such an offensive message?”

I detest having to call anybody a hypocritical, human shaped chunk of hedge hog feces, so I’ll give Susan Roesgen the benefit of the doubt and just assume that she has something of a faulty memory where some of her past excretions expressions of opinion are concerned.

Today’s protesters are being portrayed as crazy and even dangerous. Ex-CNN reporter Bob Franken called the anti-Obama protesters “a crazed group” engaged in “organized intimidation.” An August 10 graphic on MSNBC wondered: “Conservatives Coming Unhinged?” Chris Matthews saw racism: “I think some of the people are upset because we have a black President.” And ABC’s Bill Weir on Friday warned “the rising anger is now ramping up concerns over the President’s personal safety.”

These people are the ones to whom the majority of Americans go for news and informed opinion. Frightening, isn’t it?

The double-standard is obvious. How can professional journalists possibly justify it?

They can’t, because they’re not professional journalists, no matter what their credentials may indicate.

So, what are they?

My best guess? An unpleasant flotsam of some sort.

In any case, the media needs to be purged of these political whores if it wishes to regain its former status as a dependable source of information and knowledgeably, responsibly formed opinion.

There are a number of links in the Media Research Center article that is linked near the top of this post, this link, in fact, that quantify various references in the quoted narrative.

…the lefty (which is most of the) media is, despite a widespread dose of c-c-cold-d-d-d reality, still at it.

Temperatures have plummeted to record or near-record lows in 32 states this winter. On March 2, a global warming protest in Washington, D.C. was buried by nearly a foot of snow. And a new study warns that the Earth could be in for a 30-year cooling trend. Reality is not cooperating with the network news’ global warming theme, yet reporters are unwilling to even discuss the possibility that the Earth is cooling.

Global warming alarmists repeatedly link weather phenomena like tornadoes, hurricanes, ice melt, droughts and wildfires with global warming and the media embrace the stories. Yet, when cities or regions are buried in snow like the city of Chenzhou, China was in February 2008 there wasn’t a word about climate change in the cooling direction.

“It is being called China’s Hurricane Katrina,” NBC anchor Brian Williams said on Feb. 4, 2008. “… the month of blizzards that have brought it [China] to a virtual standstill. Millions have been stranded. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless.” Williams didn’t chalk up the devastation to global cooling, of course. That doesn’t fit the media’s warming narrative.

Read the rest of the article here.

James Hansen, a leading global warming alarmist, promoted a “civil disobedience” protest at a Washington, D.C. coal power plant March 2. The protestors claim that coal – and its carbon emissions are a cause of global warming. Hansen and his friends were greeted with 8 inches of snow, “strong” winds and below freezing temperatures.

Heh, heh, heh…

…and the rest of their kind, like the MSM and your general purpose liberal, as we know are still actively campaigning against the big Dubya, despite the fact that he’s not running for anything.

This is pretty much a mainstay of the liberal mindset. That is, they substitute platitudinal input for proactive tangible action — they have to know that their efforts to do whatever it is they want to do to George W. Bush is undoable, that they are merely making foolish noise in the process of burning up the contributions gleaned from their faithful followers, and more often than not making preadolescent style spectacles of themselves at the same time. I entertain no doubts as to the resentment the Three Stooges would feel had they been able to see these folks attempting to upstage them in the lunacy department.

When the Berkeley kerfuffle commenced (the peoples’ and city government’s war on the Marines recruiters there), I received a bunch of emails from Move America Forward on the issue and on their response to it, and have of course read of it in numerous other places. The backlash from around the country was sufficiently intense as to cause a couple of the Kommie San Francisco suburb’s city legislators to back pedal somewhat.

They say they support the troops but oppose Bush policies. In the same breath that they tell us they have nothing against the Marines, they tell us that the same Marines are murderers and torturers who mercenary themselves to Big Oil.

The U.S. Marines, meanwhile, are but one of several elements that comprise a community whose mission is to insure that those dizzy people in Berkeley remain free to speak out against the government and even…even against the Marines!

Please pardon me, but when the issue hit the news, and when I received the outraged emails from MAF, I hardly raised an eyebrow. I mean, this is Berkeley we’re talking about. These are the same varmints who, before the fires had even been put out on 9/11, were declaring that our country had deserved the terrorist attack. That we’d earned it. That it was our fault. How could anybody actually be shocked at anything of a treasonous nature that comes out of that lefty hell-hole?

If I were suddenly appointed king of America, I would certainly deny any voter in Berkeley, the city government included, even a dime of federal funds for anything, anything at all — this would be right before I had a large, unbroken “keep ‘em in” wall built around that leftist hell hole and then had it declared a nuclear waste dump. From then on, all people convicted of treason would be sentenced to life in Berkeley.

Radioactive Cows? In Berkeley? Mooooo!

However, I didn’t come here to talk about Berkeley. Screw Berkeley. Knock knock knockin’ on treason’s door…

A projected nine inches of snow is in the process of being dumped on Chicago, even as we speak (they’re so lucky in the Burbs, where the snow will stick, covering trees, rooftops and everything else, making for a beautiful morning after), so I’ve spent the day at home, catching up on professional stuff.

There’s a deli here called Ashkenaz that delivers a pleasing variety of Jewish fare, though I have to say that their knishes wouldn’t sell in New York — they lack every single attribute of a genuine knish, from seasoning to filling. But then, Chicago isn’t called the Second City for nothing. However, they do produce lox in all its glory, belly lox, Nova (Nova Scotia lox), etc, and deliver by the pound. They’re rather costly in this endeavor, but as far as I’m concerned, the quality of the product inspires the overlooking of their $40.00+ per pound price for cut lox. To me, salmon rules in its every form from smoked to poached in the seafood category, surpassed only by those big, meaty langostas one finds in the Caribbean.

So I’m spending this particular segment of my evening munching, in leisurely fashion, on lox and cream cheese sandwiches with ultra-thin sliced red onion and, having blown the dust off my old Enya albums (just kidding, I actually downloaded them from Yahoo! Music Jukebox), am listening to Watermark and Shepherd Moons. Celtic music with New Age overtones, good stuff.

However, I actually came here to make reference to yet another portside idiocy, one which, excluding all the above, will not take up all that much of your time. That is, the Waterboarding thing.

The left has villified it on a mega-scale, even the RINO, John McCain, has opposed it, and the tone of the arguments against it has been one that suggests it to be one of many horrible, unconscionable tortures our government employs to wrench, brutally and unmercifully, for days on end, even the most trivial, useless information from captured terrorists. It is business as usual for the fascistic, nazi Bush regime, etc, etc…

And the liberal media plays it up conjure nightmarish thoughts of the torture chambers at Prinz Albrechtstrasse or 2 Dzerzhinski Square.

Meanwhile, only three prisoners, major terrorists all, have been subjected to the actually non-harmful interrogation technique, and the longest duration involved was that of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, a terrible minute and a half! All three subjects revealed information that saved a lot of innocent lives while leading to the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and their plans for further butchery of Americans and others.

Our intelligence pros aren’t electrocuting the functionality out of their testicles, beating them to a bloody pulp or decimating their minds with lysergic acid and amatol, they’re merely creating non-damaging discomfort for what amounts to mere seconds (while SKM, an abnormally tough customer, held out for some 90 seconds, the average is 1/3 of that time).

Yet our political left, who have just as much access to information as the rest of us, have chosen to ignore the facts and use waterboarding as an anti-Bush soap box, transforming the truth into exaggerations and bald faced lies in order to promote their false doctrines — in truth, given their desperation to strip us of our Constitutional system of government and quagmire us in socialism, I can’t say as I blame them: if you want to screw an entire electorate, you have to lie to them in a convincing manner. You have to promote your intended back-door entry as a pleasurable experience, one the entire family will enjoy, knowing that once they’ve let you in, the merciless shishkabobbing, weeping and gnashing of teeth will be beyond their control.

It doesn’t matter whether the sodomist is John McCain, Barak Hussein Obama or Hillary Klinton, the results will be the same.

Speaking for myself, when it comes to interrogating terrorists, I’d just as soon we refer to the Jack Bauer manual. Our misplaced sympathy for “ill-treated” terrorists is well defined in the old song about the gentle woman (for goodness sake) who saved the snake.

We’ve watched our politicians, justices and media intentionally misinterpret the Geneva Convention to “humanize” and redefine the status of the inmates at GITMO, and heard “certain parties” strongly suggest that we bring these terrorists into the American legal system for prosecution.

What it all boils down to, I think, is that these misguided souls are so secure in their illusion that certain bizarre things could never happen to them that they are confident that they’ll be safe, even if they eliminate the very safeguards that keep them safe.

What a bunch of maroons!

…tedious in their efforts to “interest” society in their menu of micromanagement.

Of whom do I speak?

The portside media, researchers who are probably compensated, in large part, by grants financed by our tax dollars and assorted blank-minded, modern flower children who need a cause, any cause will do as long as it isn’t in any way conservative.

The people who feel it is their mandate from On-High to tell the rest of us what we can and can’t eat, the more enterprising among whom will probably soon be selling Trans-fat Credits.

The usual suspects, liberals from the Land Of The Lotus Eaters (The Odyssey) whose ambitions include snatching meat from the jaws of human carnivores and spooning yogurt into our mouths in its place.

The folks who now deem attending a good, old fashioned backyard barbecue a dangerous risk.

While my own inclination is to tell such critters to mind their own business, that what I choose to eat is my affair, I’ve had liberals tell me that the reason these people are so aggressive about their beliefs is that they are concerned that “unhealthy eaters” will one day cost taxpayers a lot of money on health care.

“Since when,” goes my stock reply, “did liberals give a flying f–k about spending the taxpayers’ money on social services related issues? You guys even endorse spending our money on illegal aliens!”

The truth is, American liberals are quite sure, and with good reason, that their efforts to trump our present form of government with socialism are succeeding. Thinking liberals are actually looking past their initial political victories at the practicalities to follow: Their social programs will cost the U.S. taxpayer dearly, and they need to find ways to cut costs, one being to put the proletariat on a diet of tofu and rice, unsweetened green tea and spring water to keep them healthy.

This program would never work for me, I was born by Occident and could never Orient myself to such a diet.

Of course, during an exchange of ideas with the flower kids who have long enjoyed desirable sustenance therein, I understand: There are benefits to be had from consuming a lot of tofu.

Indeed.

I recall an afternoon about three years ago, at an IHOP in rural Illinois, when the waitress informed me that they could not, by law, serve me a rare cheeseburger. I always order/cook my steaks and burgers rare (except prime rib, which I do medium), and requested a visit from the manager. After some debate, I explained, “It’s not how long you cook something that kills bacteria, it’s how hot you cook it.” He finally agreed on condition that “no matter what happens”, I would tell nobody that I’d been served a rare burger under his auspices. He was from India, somewhat recently to judge by his accent, and if he ever returns to the old country he’ll be a superb candidate for Bangalorian telephone Tech Support. He’d undoubtedly make a great Fred, or a passable Bill (Beel?). I only mention this because our conversation would have made an outstanding comedy skit based largely on his accent.

Relax, there’s no bigotry here, just a paucity of political correctness. I grew up in a Jewish family wherein one of our favorite holiday dinner table (or Passover seder) customs was sharing the most irreverant-but-funny Jewish jokes we’d run across. Even my grandmother, who played a puritanical role in the family, shared jokes gleefully, and hers were some of the most risque, go figure. The way I grew up, PC has never stood a chance with me and never will.

Back on track, these “healthy choice” advocates seem to assume that everybody will leap onto a government program at the first sign of illness. No one, they presume, has an HMO as back-up or sufficient wealth to obtain timely and quality medical care rather than substandard and often demeaning, government bureaucracy administered Socialized Medicine offerings.

Wrong! At least as long as the government doesn’t make it legally mandatory that all citizens participate in the program (Senior Ministers Pelosovitch and Reidakov would have no trouble with that, nor would any other mega-wealthy, double standard liberal)…

Right, while you and I are comparing tofu and rice recipes, Pelosi and Murtha would be sitting down to a chateaubriand dinner. Perhaps a platter of canard a’la orange, which the public, or non elite, can’t be allowed because of the fat content in a duck. Quack!

Michael Moore will be doing humongous pig on a spit for one.

Rosie O’Donnell will be chowing down on camel tripe and the fatty parts of a whole uncooked lamb using her bare and greasy hands, clamoring for ten pounds of pork chops as liquified provender drips down the front of her blouse.

For the rest of us, well, please pass the rice….

Sorry about that, I couldn’t help myself. What a pun! What a — oh… well, the title of this post certainly applies; if one considers what the mainstream media has been focusing on of late. First there’s the 100% political firing of a small quantity of U.S. attorneys, which happens to be a mid-term event that is practiced by nearly all administrations — as we know, Clinton’s Justice department terminated all of theirs. There was no MSM uproar when the latter occurred under Clinton, but since there is a Republican administration ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue led by George W. Bush, the former has been blown up to Armageddonal proportions by the liberal media as the Democrats raise the roof with blaring accusations and utterly moronic, blatantly politics-based innuedo….

It is eroding the Anna Nicole moment, which was just starting to wan, anyway, for all except those who are truly without lives of their own to live, and as it gathers momentum, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces that she is going to Syria on a “fact finding” tour. The White House requests that she not go, but she announces that she’s going, anyway.

She does, and not only does she perform the Kiss of Shame on Bashir Assad, she delivers a false diplomatic message from Tel Aviv to Damascus that not only isn’t she asked to deliver, but there has been no message sent. Then she reports false peace policies of Assad’s government regarding Israel to the local media. There is no “fact finding” involved in her tour, only hints and not so subtle hints that indicate that the United States has two completely different sets of official policies on the execution of the War on Terror, and that the Democrats’ policies are equally as official as the President’s. What she is doing is in total violation of the concerned articles of the U.S. Constitution, dangerous to both our diplomatic relations and Bush’s message to the world on America’s resolve to defeat terrorism and a serious threat to U.S. troops in Iran and Afghanistan.

Some of the same liberal media that supports her editorializes her activities in a negative light while most of the same liberals that disagree with every point made at conservative blogs they frequent of course present laughably thin, generally downright stupid defenses of Pelosi’s harebrained, purely political exploits.

Don Imus comes into the picture, making a joke that has the race baiting team of Sharpton & Jackson crawling out from beneath their respective stones — did I employ the word “picayune” at the top of this post? Um, sure did! Back in the 1970s when I lived in New York, Imus had the morning show on an A.M. station while Howard Stern worked mid afternoon to early evening on the same station. Both of them were shock jocks, and both made a living out of boldly offending whatever or whomever came to mind. Nothing has changed with either, particularly Imus. Now he makes a “nappy haired ho” remark about players on a female college basketball team, which is not, by far, the most offensive thing he’s ever said into the mic, and it’s suddenly treated as the most important, dynamic story on the planet by the MSM and Democrats (as well as a few soulless Republican politicians whose lives revolve around pandering for votes wherever they can find them), conveniently drowning out much of the Pelosi-in-Syria affair. Now, Nancy’s talking about taking a trip to Iran to nasalize some butt for Ahmadmanjihad.

Liberal politicians are doing their best to take a bite out of our First Amendment rights by enacting “hate crime” laws that aren’t crimes.

The Democrats have absolutely no issues of a positive nature on the table, everything they do attacks the President, the Constitution and the American way of life, and most of their purely political assaults are based upon trivialities that they themselves have blown up into maelstroms of misinterpreted laws and ridiculous innuendo, from Scooter Libby, who did nothing wrong, to the federal judge firings, the liberal media conducting disinformation campaigns to bring things to a boil.

The media we are confronted with today is a joke, I mean why waste money on a newspaper today when one can enjoy the same awareness of what’s going on in the world by reading The Onion?

… of being mightier than the sword — or at least, given our more modern scribe-gear, and visual media, the keyboard and videocam have.

Daniel Pipes makes an excellent point.

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen once determined the outcome of warfare, but no longer. Today, television producers, columnists, preachers, and politicians have the pivotal role in deciding how well the West fights. This shift has deep implications.

This is true. Look at Iraq, for example: We’re winning the war there, but we’re losing it at home, thousands of miles away from the battlefield, thanks entirely to our liberal media and scads of lying left wing politicians, both of which cadres place priority on an anti-Bush agenda over the safety of Americans or eventual total victory for our military.

This looks to be a rerun of Vietnam — not the “quagmire” the left referred to, but the ultimate loss of a war, on “paper”, that we are winning in real life.

The nature of the enemy is of course different than those we faced in pre-Vietnam wars, both that which we face in Iraq and that which we face in the rest of the many elements of the Global War On Terror. Actually, “GWOT” is PC, we are actually at war, despite the sheeplike murmurings of spineless politicians and the blatherings of partisan media, with Islam.

Today we fight against terrorists who employ guerilla warfare, albeit in its most vile possibilities — to us, collateral damage is the accidental killing of noncombatants. To the enemy, the murder of innocents is the primary strategy and the percentage of military casualties inflicted is as far below the number of civilian deaths as the latter number is less than the former in the course of our operations.

Thus, typically, the American political left blames the Bush administration for the civilian casualty numbers caused by the enemy and spins it so “Bush’s criminal war in Iraq has killed X number of innocent Iraqis”. They make the President out to be responsible for the acts of terrorists, many of whom are not even from Iraq and are there to prevent democracy from succeeding in that country.

And since the liberal media rules the roost in America, all too many Americans who trust them to deliver the truth are instead fed this disinformation and believe it.

What Carl von Clausewitz called war’s “center of gravity” has shifted from force of arms to the hearts and minds of citizens. Do Iranians accept the consequences of nuclear weapons? Do Iraqis welcome coalition troops as liberators? Do Palestinians willingly sacrifice their lives in suicide bombings? Do Europeans and Canadians want a credible military force? Do Americans see Islamism presenting a lethal danger?

Non-Western strategists recognize the primacy of politics and focus on it. A string of triumphs — Algeria in 1962, Vietnam in 1975, and Afghanistan in 1989 — all relied on eroding political will. Al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, codified this idea in a letter in July 2005, observing that more than half of the Islamists’ battle “is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”

Read the rest of the OpEd here.

Diana West has a spot-on commentary about the way the New York Times, once again, manages to go the PC route and ignore pertinent facts in order to whitewash the violence and the suppressed status of women that are both fundamentals of Islam.

Her commentary covers a three part interview with a New York Imam that just concluded in the New York Times.

Such journalistic jaw-droppers abound: not only gaping holes, like the one above, but also dead ends that leave countless questions that the female reporter, it seems, never thought to ask. For example, she notes, over six months of interviews, the Egyptian-born imam refused to shake her hand. “He offers women only a nod,” she writes. Why is shaking hands with a woman “improper”? What does the imam think about sexual equality? She doesn’t tell us. In Belgium last year, she doesn’t mention, the female president of the parliament made headlines for canceling a meeting with an Iranian delegation over this same refusal to shake a woman’s hand (the parliamentarian’s own); while in Holland, the English-language blog Zacht Ei reported, a Muslim man lost a month’s worth of welfare benefits for not only refusing to shake hands with female municipal employees, but also refusing to acknowledge their presence. This is supposed to be “the story of Mr. Shata’s journey west,” but the story bypasses such landmark issues.

Instead, we get a load of happy talk: “Married life in Islam is an act of worship,” Mr. Shata says. So impressed were the editors of The New York Times by this load that they ran the quotation, not just above the fold, but across the very top of the front page over a gold-bathed family photo four columns wide. Does Miss Reporter ask the imam to reconcile this ecstatic notion with the Islamic custom of arranged and forced marriages, the spate of spousal abuse and “honor killings” within European Muslim communities…

The entire article is here.

During my perusal of today’s Jewish World Review, I came upon this oh-so-true column by the great Mark Steyn about the lameness of today’s media, and thought I should share it. It’s titled Media Deserves Blame For New Orleans Debacle, but it doesn’t stop there.

The facts they put in front of us were wrong, and they didn’t talk truth to power. They talked to goofs in power, like New Orleans’ Mayor Nagin and Police Chief Compass, and uncritically fell for every nutso yarn they were peddled. The media swallowed more bilge than if they’d been lying down with their mouths open as the levee collapsed. Ten thousand dead! Widespread rape and murder! A 7-year-old gang-raped and then throat-slashed! It was great stuff — and none of it happened. No gang-raped 7-year-olds. None.

More?

Four years ago, you’ll recall, we were bogged down in “the brutal Afghan winter.” By “we,” I don’t mean the military but the media. The line on Afghanistan was that it was the white man’s grave. Actually, it was the grave that was white; the man was more of a blueish color thanks to temperatures “so cold that eyelids crust and saliva turns to sludge in the mouth,” according to Knight-Ridder’s Tom Ifield. “Realistically,” reported New York’s Daily News, “U.S. forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options.”

Er, no. “Realistically,” U.S. forces turned out to have a window of four years, which is how long they’ve been waiting for the “fast, fast approaching” (ABC’s ”Nightline”) brutal Afghan winter to show up. It’s Knight-Ridder’s news reports that turn to sludge on your lips. The “brutal Afghan winter” is a media fiction.

Go ahead, read the entire column. Next time you open up the New York Times, whose online version is now charging a subscription fee to read their op-ed’s or special features, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post or any other MSM newspapers, watch CNN, CBS, ABC, or NBC news shows, think about Steyn’s column, then wonder how much truth you’re reading vs how much fiction.