[427TJ]

Hmmm, should I take the bait or pass on this one? Okay, I'll man-up and add my two cents.

Liberal media. Yeah, there's liberals in the media--that idiot Dan Rather comes to mind and his predecessor Walter Cronkite was too, but Cronkite was a Franklin Roosevelt liberal and not a Janis Joplin/hairy-armpits/stinky '60s San Francisco hippie liberal (who wants to take all of our wealth and give it to poor non-white people). Anyway, the New York Times is certainly left-leaning but wasn't it their own Judith Miller who sounded the war alarms on the NYT front pages in late 2002 and early 2003? Scooter Libby schmoozed her and wooed her and then fed her the "inside info" and she, being AMBITIOUS and DESPERATE to further her career (remember that), plastered the NYT front page day after day with the coming doom unless we attacked Saddam. So, the liberal New York Times got in lock-step with the administration and helped sell the idea of pre-emptive war with Iraq. But I see your point. Let's just assume that the liberal media is only as liberal as it's corporate ownership allows it to be . When it's safe to be liberal, like now that the war is dragging on and on and on with little real progress*, they will go against an unpopular president. But that's the media's natural pack-mentality: they all follow the same story since none of them want to be left behind if it's a big one. Here's where a media reporter's ambition comes into play. Reporters like Miller want to get rich and famous (like Bob Woodward, et al) and they'll jump on any scoop they can get their ambitious back-stabbing greedy little hands on. Judy Miller realized that Libby was inviting her into the Bush administration inner sanctum and she took the bait. She was greedy and ambitious, not liberal. She saw her chance and went for it. In 2003 the liberal media dared not stand in the way of the war drummers so Judith Miller was allowed by NYT corporate managers to post her dire warnings of Iraqi mushroom clouds over New York City. Yeah, she went to jail over it and so will Libby but the liberal media collapsed under the pressure of the beating war drums and the clamoring public who wanted to go kick someone's ass big-time after 9/11.

*War progress. Yes, I am sure there are schools being built and little Iraqi kids singing the star-spangled banner every morning but the Iraqi government is completely unable to come to terms with what they need to do to save that country. Bush can push on them all he wants to but those tribal Iraqis know damn-well that they are all marked men and dare not stick their necks out too far lest they get their heads cut-off by their Muslim brothers. (We do that in America too but we don't actually cut people's heads off--we sick special prosecutors on them.) That part of the world has always been run by tribal factions (us too in a sense) and not central governments and trying to whip a little democracy (small-d democracy) on them will only allow them to elect their own tribesmen. Look at Lebanon--they held elections in 2005 and they democratically elected Hezbollah! Ooops! That's not what we meant when we said we wanted a democratic Middle East! OH SH*T! We pushed them toward democracy and they elected the the terrorists! Too bad nobody stood up and warned us of the folly of trying to convert ancient and deeply religious fundamentalist Arab Islamic tribes into embracing democracy and embracing their fellow Arab tribes. Well, Colin Powell made a half-hearted attempt to warn Bush not to "break" Iraq but Powell didn't have the balls to resign because America was frothing at the lips to go kill some Arabs so he shut his mouth after one weak warning not to do this. And the American army is mired right in the middle because that's where the oil is! How many times has President Bush changed his rationale (reasons) for going into Iraq? Is that the liberal media's fault or is that Bush's fault?

Guess what? We are in Iraq for 50 years. As long as there's extractable oil in the ground we will be there and our kids will die there. F_ck the politics of this, we are there for the LONG haul. Our little sons and daughters, many of them not yet born, will go there and die for the rest of us, just as young people always have.

Yeah, we can rant about the media, both liberal (controls everything--yeah, sure it does) and FOX/right-wing media. You know what? It's really not the media's fault, although they always share the blame, it's OUR fault for sitting on the couch and flipping away from the news--FOX or CNN or whatever you like--to watch baseball or Barrett-Jackson or Survivor. (I prefer baseball with B-J a close second.) We're in deep, deep sh*t in the Middle East and the media will report the failures because that's what the ratings dictate--we want to see the bad news, not good news. "If it bleeds it leads" is the media manager/editor's motto because we love the bloody stuff. Some of us don't but most of us do.

Last thing before I go out and drive deck screws in my new back deck. (The Home Depot plastic Trek stuff. It looks great.)

Our next president will not pull us out of Iraq. I'll say that again. Our next president will not pull us out of Iraq. Americans may be 70% against the war in polls but they are 99% FOR affordable gasoline. Our next president will not pull us out of Iraq because the price of gas will go well over $5 a gallon and maybe much higher. Talk about committing suicide. No president will commit suicide by allowing the price of gas to go wildly out of control upon a pullout of Iraq. We built 14 PERMANENT BASES in Iraq since we went in and we are there for the "long hard slog," as Don Rumsfeld put it.

Relax, the media really doesn't control things, especially if we Americans aren't watching or reading anything they are putting out.

Now I'm going to go drive-in a hundred deck screws and then go for a ride in my Camaro and put some Trick pump 101 in it at the 76 station. Yeah, it's $6.25 a gallon but I don't care as long as I can just pull up to the pump and put it in.

All of this is just my two cents and I could be wrong.