IRAQ TURNING POINT?

Says InstaPundit : "WHY IS MURTHA'S STATEMENT ON THE WAR NEWS when he said basically the same thing a year and a half ago? This is from May 6, 2004:

"Signaling a new, more aggressive line against the Bush administration's policy on Iraq, Rep. John Murtha (Pa.), the House Democrats' most visible defense hawk, will join Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) today to make public his previously private statements that the conflict is 'unwinnable.' "

Not quite the same as a pullout, is it?

Speaking of the Insta man, Reason's Matt Welch takes on Glenn Reynolds, saying "a common theme that Reynolds has long helped to promote -- that American journalists are monolithically serving the needs of, and perhaps even openly rooting for, American's enemies. It's a load of bull, but that hasn't stopped Reynolds from warning sadly about what will happen to the First Amendment if Americans start believing the nonsense his friends write. . . .

"I don't think we'll ever 'lose our free press,' for these or any other reasons, though I'll note again that if the sky should indeed fall in this way we should reserve at least some finger-pointing for the people who popularized the inaccurate idea that the media is rooting as one for America's enemies. . . .

"Or maybe it boils down to this -- it's OK to say that 'Newsweek lied, people died,' but don't you dare say such a thing about the guy who actually commands the world's most powerful military."

Glenn responds:

"I don't mind reporting about problems. (I've done it myself, with regard to the war crimes originally reported by Zeyad, problems with CERP, etc. Reporting on things that are actually going wrong, without the 'see, Bush is horrible!' spin, and false facts, that we're getting elsewhere, is actually helpful, and we could use more of it. It would, however, be work, and it might help Bush out, which is apparently unforgivable.) Reporting that is dishonest, or deliberately misleading -- and there's a lot of that -- is different. By treating complaints about dishonest and politically motivated reporting as the equivalent of complaints about simply reporting bad news, Welch is attacking a straw man."

Andrew Sullivan takes sides:

"Why, after all, should the president somehow be excused from responsibility for the war he launched and has conducted with such glaring incompetence? Maybe Bush is horrible as a war-leader. Has that occurred to Reynolds yet? Maybe if he'd had the [cojones] to point that out last year, instead of cowering behind the 'Kerry-is-worse' meme for months on end, and hyping the Swift-Boat attacks, we'd have had more pressure to change course.

"For the record, it is not unpatriotic to call this president on the mistakes he has made - the grotesque recklessness of invading a country with no serious plan for the post-invasion, the wrecking of the United States' reputation for humane treatment of prisoners, the debunked intelligence on which he relied (oh, sorry, we're not supposed to criticize the guy who assured us that there were stockpiles of WMDs as a fact, because others were wrong as well). Reynolds simply won't criticize the president for the mistakes for which this president is responsible. Worse, he's arguing that anyone who points out that, yes, Bush is horrible as a commander-in-chief is somehow unhelpful or unpatriotic. One day, denial and distraction from reality will finally collapse at Instapundit."

Kevin Drum says Bush is the one playing politics: