The New York Times, and now the New Yorker, have confessed that things are so much improved in Iraq that it bears little resemblance to the situation a year or so ago. The New Yorker went a step further saying:

In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize. With the general election four months away, Obama’s rhetoric on the topic now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far. . . He doubtless realizes that his original plan, if implemented now, could revive the badly wounded Al Qaeda in Iraq, reënergize the Sunni insurgency, embolden Moqtada al-Sadr to recoup his militia’s recent losses to the Iraqi Army, and return the central government to a state of collapse. The question is whether Obama will publicly change course before November. So far, he has offered nothing more concrete than this: “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.” . . . Yet, as exhausted as the public is with the war, a candidate who seems heedless of progress in Iraq will be vulnerable to the charge of defeatism, which John McCain’s campaign will connect to its broader theme of Obama’s inexperience in and weakness on national security. The relative success of the surge is one of the few issues going McCain’s way; we’ll be hearing about it more and more between now and November, and it might sway some centrist voters who have doubts about Obama.

So now other MSM outlets can get into the act. MSNBC tips its hand by saying, “This isn’t the Weekly Standard writing about this.” And other mainstream media sources likewise rush to confirm that, my gosh, Obama has a problem.

Perhaps if mainstream media reporters and pundits actually read something other than each other’s publications they might learn something new. Seriously, they tell us that the same facts reported months ago by Weekly Standard wasn’t worth a mention but a belated account from the New Yorker is? There could be no better proof that the worst victim of the media cocoon is the mainstream media itself.

And now that the “truth” may come out, because liberal outlets, not just conservative ones, confess that Iraq is entirely changed and Obama looks out to lunch unless he adopts a more realistic approach. The MSM outlets, like six-year-olds chasing the soccer ball, will race toward the story. A flurry of reports is likely to follow. Who knew that things were so different in Iraq? The entire Right blogosphere, military bloggers, independent experts, and numerous government officials. But now that the New Yorker has spoken, we can all hear about it.

del.icio.us

Google

Facebook

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 4:58 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.