Matt You and Peggy are both right. The MSM has been hiding facts for many decades. Now people who want to be informed (and that is probably a small %) can get the facts; not the propaganda the MSM has given us as "facts" for 50 years.

Rejoice that Ms. Noonan was liberated from Ratherville long ago, & that she went on to better things: Reagan & Revolution. Still, she needs acronym enhancement therapy. 'MSM' & various variants are way too awkward. Shall we -- in the spirit of fashionable leftist outrage against Big Business, Big Tobacco, & Big Pharma -- vent against Big Media by its real name, BM? We shall.

Months ago Noonan suggested that President Bush has made too much history & too many orphans. We should thank him, she implied, for restoring moral clarity to the Clintonian cesspool, then we should fire him.

In the soul's dark night I had anticipated Noonan. Perhaps because BM imparted no good news about Bush after the spider hole of 2003, it seemed that 2004 might be an Inflection Election.

(Others from the last century were 1920, 1932, 1952, 1980. It's not that Wilson/Cox, Hoover, Truman/Adlai, or Carter were bad men, although Wilson probably was & Carter probably is, but their administrations had fallen into the second law of political holes. The first law is, if you don't want to be in a hole, stop digging. The second law of holes is, even if you stop digging, you're still in the hole.)

I didn't vote for Bush in 2000. I voted for the other guy, Cheney. I assailed the Left for being wrong about the liberation of Afghanistan and wrong about almost everything else since about 1948. I blogged a good war thru March 2003, easy to do when you're long past draft age, & there's no draft. But on April Fools' Day 2003 I told my draft-age son that the Left maybe got it right. Maybe Dick Cheney, Bernard Lewis, and I got it wrong. Maybe Iraq is a very deep hole.

In 1952 Truman's Korea was a deep hole. It's been said that the Korean stalemate effected by Ike in 1953 was so bad that Truman would have been rightly derided for considering it. But the operative point is that Truman was dug in deep; he couldn't accomplish even a bad settlement.

Fast forward to 2004. We discerned a few points of dim light in Kay & Duelfer, but BM's bad news seemed for once to reflect reality, an administration melting down into its own hole. Kerry is no Eisenhower or Reagan, not even a useful public servant and senator like Harding, but maybe he could have filled the sinking bottomless pit of a FUBAR war as Eisenhower did in 1953. Maybe domestic regime change would have led to better things before the unintended consequences sank in.

Then I woke up. Voting for anything like Kerry in the light of day was and is impossible. But it's also impossible, in the twilight of the soul's dark night, to continue to continue to pretend that Cheney et al know what they're doing. They are in a hole. We are in a hole, and we are melting down. Their's is not a conservative administration. It's Wilsonian pathology all over again.

Michael Scheuer, the Author Formally Known as Anonymous, mostly gets it right in his book, Imperial Hubris, a book that offers no consolation to the Left. It offers no consolation to us, either. Aside from its absurd final chapter, Imperial Hubris demonstrates history's time warp. Militant Islam, which hadn't had a real good day for about 1000 years, again has something to live for and something to die for. To extend the metaphor of holes, they have shovels, they have a Crusade, & they want to bury us.

If blogging is such a great venue for the expression of individual opinion, I will never understand why so many participants feel compelled to hide behind noms de plume.

If "sandalista" is a real person, I would like to hear more from him (her?) on Anonymous the Hole Rectifier. I thought he was Confusion Confounded, but I am willing to listen (read).

Nom de Guerre: "sandalista" is really real, Mr. Rekdal (is that a nom by another name?) but is confused re your Condounded Confusioins & Retified Holes. (Rectumfied Holes, perhaps?)

Please translate.

Let me try that again.

Nom de Guerre: "sandalista" is really real, Mr. Rekdal (is that a nom by another name?), but is confused re your Confounded Confusions & Rectified Holes. (Rectumfied Holes, perhaps?) (Rumsfeldian?)

bush and cheney have done nothing but lie and mislead since they came into office. if you'd like to read a great example, check out www.harpers.org/WhitewashAsPublicService.html. despite this proclivity, over half the country apparently believed them when they talked about being greeted by flowers in bagdad. what a joke. i was out marching against this Quixotic adventure from day one. not because i am against overthrowing brutal dictators or fostering democracy. but because this gang of incompetent thugs was obviously going to make a disaster of it. it blew my mind when pundits like Friedman and Hitchens talked about this noble crusade against "Islamo-fascism." it sounds very romantic, doesn't it? until your kid comes back in a box for a policy that was doomed before it got started.

i supported the invasion of Afghanistan. that obviously had to be done. but then we abandoned that job while Bush and Cheney lied about Saddam's links to 9-11 and got us into our current mess. we should have instead invested a ton of resources in Afghanistan for a Marshall Plan-style modernization and democratization. not only would it have been the right thing to do, but it would have actually won over "hearts and minds" in the Muslim world.

instead, we now have two failed states, more heroin entering the country than ever, and more terrorists than ever (and multiplying rapidly). worst of all, Iraq has completely jumped the shark. we now have a nationalist insurgency against colonial occupation (always impossible to defeat in the long-term) mixed with an incipient civil war between different religious and ethnic groups. add the Kurdish struggle against our allies and long-time human rights abusers the Turks. spice it up with Iranian power-politics and regional self-interest. throw in a convenient battleground where every unemployed angry young malcontent from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen can get a piece of the action and die in the glorious battle against the infidels.

gee, do you really think it's a disaster??

Mr. Stroud: Although you & the 'anonymous' author of Imperial Hubris assert that Afghanistan is a failed state, your only evidence is heroin and warlords. Situation normal, in other words.

And in other Other Words, is it possible that Big Media, BM, have distorted the perception & the reality of Afghanistan because both perception & reality would make Bush look good? Against almost all odds, against much conventional wisdom, Afghanistan recently had an election, ignored by Big Media & the rest of the Left, that looks more valid than an election in, say, Washington state.

Ten years ago Big Media almost soiled themselves in their ecstacy over an election or "election" in the failed state of South Africa. Surely Karzai's validation is no less valid than Mandela's was.

And please spare us this tired trope: Of course the whole world was for us and with us when we were on the road to Kabul & Tora Bora. The New Republic back then demonstrated that much of the leftover Left (Michael Moore, Susan Sontag) were singing the usual hate-America blues. On 9/12, remember, they were telling us that 9/11 was all our fault. So was the Church Council of Greater Seattle. Before the end of September 2001, they assured us that millions of Afganis would die from starvation if we went in. To be fair and balanced, Pat Buchanan was spewing some of the same spew.

Back to Iraq: There's more evidence that FDR lied us toward war in 1939 & 1940 than that Bush lied us toward war two years ago. (Check Roosevelt's Secret War by Joe Persico.) There's much evidence that Clinton's excellent Balkans adventures, c. 3000 Serb civilians collaterally damaged to death by Clinton's bombs from 30,000 feet, were premised on Big Media lies via Anthony Lewis & the NY nooz. (Check an essay by Benjamin Schwarz in The Atlantic Monthly, last spring.)

Bush lied, but about the cost of Medicare drugs, not about the Iraq attack. About Iraq he got it wrong, just as Clinton did when Clinton said Saddam had WMDs and that he'd use them.

Clinton and Bush called for regime change in Iraq. Bush pushed it through. If you preferred the status quo, with Saddam & his charming children running wild, then you place an implicit provisional vote for his rape rooms, human hamburger shredders, and oil-for-torture kickbacks via the UN.

In my second thoughts about Iraq, I now suspect a Clintonian Third Way was possible. The CIA doubted it, but surely there was a price at which Saddam could have been bought. Fr. Aristide in Haiti & Taylor in Liberia sold themselves down the river. Saddam, perhaps, would have done the same.

More: It's droll that you cite Harpers here & there (the previous thread re Islamic fascism with a human face) to back up assertions about Bush/Cheney 'lies'. Harper's editor confessed that he wrote his rant against the 2004 GOP convention before the convention occurred. Lapham, like Joe Wilson and Dan Rather, is a lying liar. Like Jayson Blair & Stephen Glass, Lapham is a 'rather' well-paid fabulist.

Peggy Noonan is magnificently right about obsequiously Left Newsweek. I don't get directly blast faxed by the DNC, but I occasionally read Clift & HowWierd Fineman in Newsweek. Same difference. (George Will is their intermittent token conservative, although Will spends most of his tokens by sliming & maligning conservatives. That gets him invited back to the Georgetown cocktail circuit.)

Robert Samuelson is Newsweek's token adult.

Dear Sandalista: Ok, I get it. Nom de guerre. Sandalista. One of those Latin American conflicts, right? I forget which side the Sandalistas were on, but you seem reasonably intelligent, so I guess they were the good guys.

What I was asking, in my oblique and obviously unfunny way, was for you to expatiate a bit more on your reasons for liking the book by Michael Scheuer. I thought he was a crack-pot.

Please be succinct. I am 65 and fall asleep easily.

Teh sandalists wer eset up by the Boleshiveks in 1918. Wilson first tried to defend against them wit the Army, Army could not get the job done so he sent in the Marines in 1919. Chesty got his first heart and star in 24 fighting Sandanists for freedom.

Mr. Rekdal: Michael Scheuer wrote something that, like being hanged, concentrated the mind.

Osama bin Laden, according to Scheuer, recently sought & received assurance from a fundamentalist scholar of the Koran that God will absolve bin Laden for the collateral deaths of American Muslims during the next big bang.

The Koran is apparently clear about God's approval of the mass murder of infidels. The Koran is less clear about killing Muslims as an unintended consequence of murdering infidels, but bin Laden's Koranic dispensation implies that God has mysterious ways of weighing the deaths of the just & the unjust.

Bin Laden requires moral clarity before the serious killing of holy war begins. According to the divine calculus, it's a Go.

more about hubris in the 12 January thread, below.