It’s hard to figure out how the Los Angeles Times could stick the headline “Gates on board with Obama’s Iraq plan” at the top of this article. Barack Obama’s plan – at least, the one he swore to uphold throughout his campaign – was to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office. According to the LA Times, Robert Gates said of the withdrawal issue: “That bridge has been crossed,” by virtue of the U.S.-Iraq security agreement. That agreement calls for U.S. troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

If Gates is okay with American forces staying in Iraq for three more years, in what way can it be said that he is “on board with Obama’s Iraq plan”? There is one answer, and a responsible article would have reflected it in the headline, “Obama on board with Bush’s Iraq plan.” Obviously, Obama has come around to dropping his notion of a 16-month drawdown and embraced the three-year time table worked out between the Bush administration and the Maliki government in Iraq.

This is a good thing. Abandoning Iraq in the midst of its recovery would likely lead to a humanitarian disaster and an irreversible American geopolitical catastrophe. Obama should be praised for rejecting fantastical slogans in favor of necessary policy.

That the mainstream media is unable to drop its campaign compulsion to come to Obama’s rescue at every turn is deeply troubling. Obama won. There’s no need to distort facts in his favor anymore. If the press continues to act irresponsibly and fawn over our incoming president the way they fawned over Obama the candidate, then whatever national “healing” Obama promised to get underway doesn’t stand a chance. By sticking with Bush administration personalities like Robert Gates, Obama has demonstrated a willingness to move past the partisan rancor that has poisoned this country for nearly eight years.

By refusing to get out of the Obama tank, and start finding the story again, journalists reveal the depths of their pathology. In their effort to sway an election, they demonstrated a chilling disdain for the American public. But as career cultists of a defunct order, they are ensuring their permanent irrelevance.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.