Dems and media determined to ignore Iraq progress

Mark Steyn, as usual, tells it like it is:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, came out with a big statement on Iraq last week. Did you hear about it? Probably not. Everyone was still raving about his Democrat colleague, Rep. Jack Murtha, whose carefully nuanced position on Iraq is: We’re all doomed unless we pull out by next Tuesday! (I quote from memory.)

Also, the United States Army is “broken,” “worn out” and “living hand to mouth.” If the reaction to Murtha’s remarks by my military readers is anything to go by, he ought to be grateful they’re still bogged down in Iraq and not in the congressional parking lot.

It’s just about acceptable in polite society to disagree with Murtha, but only if you do it after a big 20-minute tongue bath about what “a fine man” he is (as Rumsfeld said) or what “a good man” he is (as Cheney called him) or what “a fine man, a good man” he is (as Bush phrased it). Nobody says that about Lieberman, especially on his own side. And, while the media were eager to promote Murtha as the most incisively insightful military expert on the planet, this guy Lieberman’s evidently some nobody no one need pay any attention to.

Here’s why. His big piece on Iraq was headlined “Our Troops Must Stay.”

And who wants to hear that? Not the media and certainly not Lieberman’s colleagues in the Defeaticrat Party. It must be awful lonely being Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Party these days. Every time he switches on the news there’s John Kerry sonorously droning out his latest pretzel of a position: Insofar as I understand it, he’s not calling for a firm 100 percent fixed date of withdrawal — like, say, Feb. 4, 2 p.m.; meet at Baghdad bus station with two pieces of carry-on. Don’t worry, it’s not like flying coach on TWA, you’d be able to change the date without paying a surcharge. But Kerry drones that we need to “set benchmarks” for the “transfer of authority.” Actually, the administration’s been doing that for two years — setting dates for the return of sovereignty, for electing a national assembly, for approving a constitution, etc, and meeting all of them. And all during those same two years Kerry and his fellow Democrats have huffed that these dates are far too premature, the Iraqis aren’t in a position to take over, hold an election, whatever. The Defeaticrats were against the benchmarks before they were for them.

Exactly. The media (and the very clever Dems) have all but called anyone unpatriotic who dares to criticize Murtha, because of his stance on Iraq and war credentials – and because of his alleged “hawk” status, but practically ignore much more spot on remarks by Senator Joe Lieberman, the one Democrat who seems to “get it” in terms of how we need to stay the course, not denigrate the mission our military men and women are fighting, because they need us to be united behind them – not torn apart in a political civil war between Democrats and Republicans, and especially not over statements the Dems clearly are lying about now that they knew were true up until they decided to play politics shamelessly with the Iraq war in order to try and gain political advantage going into the ’06 campaign season.

What the media seems to want to focus solely on are troop deaths and what the Democrats seem to want to focus on is making public announcements about exactly when they think we should pull out, failing to realize that’s exactly what the terrorists are focusing on too, for entirely different reasons.

(Cross-posted at California Conservative)