Media Spotlight

The Bush War

Bravo Washington Post! The only real news I have seen at any level this week was by the article titled,”Democrats Push Toward Middle on Iraq Policy”. If the American people are supposed to judge what the real issues are by what they hear in the media then they have to hear the real issue at various levels within the media and right now the only one talking about the real issue is the Washington Post.

The reporting of General Patraeus has been judged adequately by the Democratic Party as only mimicking the ideas of President Bush. Democratic Senator John Warner even asked Patraeus if all of this is making America safer, and he himself replied, “I don’t know!” He then went on to say that he had not considered it because he felt his job as a General was to go there and report back with the best ways to achieve the mission. Democrats who have been waiting for this report felt this was not supposed to be a report that only gave recommendations on how to achieve Bush’s mission, but to come back with a non-partisan view of how things were going in Iraq.

The drama did not end there though. Republicans who may have still understood the original premise was to get “Al-Qaeda” may have been somewhat shocked as Senator Gary Adkerman twice mentioned that there was no “Al-Qaeda” formed until 2005 in Iraq. Of course, both times the question was asked the General continued to ignore and evade the question and even drowned out the Senator as he asked it.

It has become more than obvious to everyone who has been hoping to bring our troops home that the President is going to continue to get his way. This is mainly because the media on the right only replays the section with the General saying he was recommending bringing our troops home and then backing it up with a clip from President Bush saying he was going to stand behind the Generals recommendations. To anyone who may have been watching the entire report, this in itself is false. Patraeus not only used data sets without sources, but used figures that all contradict more established data sets held by, “The Associated Press”, “The Washington Post”, “The Government Accounting Office”, “General Jones” and the “Iraqi Forces”.

It is because of this that the real issue leaves the realm of the media we are seeing and becomes only what the Washington Post article stresses, “How do we get the Republican moderates in the Senate to change their vote and allow the democratic party to make a change without the threat of a veto from this President?”