Beyond the Call to Surge, the Need to Purge Our Media

For the second time this week, we feel the need to address this strange admiration for Bush, by some in the news media, because he, supposedly, believes in what he is doing, even if he has to stand alone, as if that is always a good thing in a leader.

What if that leader is delusional?

Adolph Hitler believed whole-heartedly in what he was doing, attempting to take over all of Europe and exterminate the Jewish people. Is he to be admired for that? Not by me, that's for sure!

If the driver of the car, in which you are a passenger, believes, whole-heartedly, that if he just drives fast enough, he can fly over the Grand Canyon, do you just admire the hell out of him, all the way to your death on the Canyon floor?

Do any of these people really know what Bush believes?

This guy has told so many contradicting stories about what he believes, who the hell knows?

There was a time that he didn't believe in nation building. That was hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of bucks ago.

There was a time he believed in a humble foreign policy. Pre-9/11 thinking? I don't think so.

We could have still had a humble foreign policy, if we had completed the mission in Afghanistan and left Iraq the hell alone, but that was never in the cards, was it?

Beyond the Call to Surge, the Need to Purge Our Media:

In the aftermath of President Bush's prime-time war cry for escalation from the White House Library, the network newscasters were skeptical about his chances for success but seemed to be impressed by his willingness to stand up for what they think he believes, like some lone but gutsy hero on the prairie.

Much of the commentary deals with him as the beleaguered leader standing strong against public opinion but doing what he feels he had to do. The subtext was you just have to admire that man This is the very positioning his image managers cultivated.

The focus was on one man speaking to one camera, standing alone in a library, a White House room you had a sense with which he was unfamiliar, speaking to the teleprompter, reading someone else's words with as much well-practiced conviction as he could muster. The tone was reasonable because of his many claims of having listened to advice from his team and even his critics.

There was no analysis of who wrote the speech or the attitudes of his many Generals and advisors who disagreed with its thrust. There was no reminder that the Iraqi military actually opposed it. He positively cited the Iraq Survey Group whose recommendations he had actually rejected, as in, 'in keeping with the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, we will increase the embedding of American advisers.