A Turning Point on Iraq

"You can read this piece in Newsweek to get Andrew Natsios' take on what happened. He was head of USAID at the time."

HuffPoster Paul Reickhoff doesn't buy the recent complaints about the media's lack of good news from Iraq.

"I believe that press coverage in Iraq is definitely too narrow. But too negative? I don't think so. If you are looking for good news stories in a war zone, you are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. It is like looking for virgins at the Playboy mansion -- you might find a few, but they're certainly not the majority. If you want good news stories, go to Disneyland. Not Iraq."

Reickhoff shares an e-mail from a soldier in Iraq who is, shall we say, disillusioned:

"The bottom line is, the overwhelming majority of people live in fear. We can do NOTHING to help them. We don't have anywhere near the manpower, and our actions are too severely restricted. Good thing 2500 people died for this. What are the good news stories? I would love to hear them. Spare me the heart warming tales of a single family or school or neighborhood that was helped. Operation Iraqi Freedom is, at this point, an abject failure. This is the most dangerous place on earth and it's getting worse, not better."

Jonathan Chait is feeling, well, outgunned:

"I blame George W. Bush's election for many ills, and, to that list, I can now add the fact that I have been publicly shamed for not owning a gun. My unwilling confession took place a month ago, while I was being interviewed by the right-wing radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. He asked me whether I owned a gun and whether I had ever owned a gun (in what seemed to be consciously McCarthyite language). Later, he proceeded with a lengthier inquisition into whether I had friends or relatives in the military. He asked a version of this question some half-dozen times. ('Is there anyone that you want to bring up, like your aunt or your uncle, or the guy down the street?') I volunteered that my next-door neighbor and friend is a naval reservist, but this failed to mollify him. 'Do you know anyone who's been back and forth to Iraq and been deployed there?' he asked. Sadly, I was unable to produce any evidence for my defense. In the court of right-wing talk radio, I was convicted of being a blue-state elitist.

"This is a very odd cultural moment we find ourselves in, where there is a stigma attached to not owning a gun or not having friends shipped out to Iraq."

You've gotta love New York politics. First there's Kathleen McFarland:

"A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The New York Post."

And who can forget the comedy stylings of Al D'Amato?

"For the last few months, William F. Weld's bid to become governor of New York has had a sharp thorn in its side: the outspoken opposition of the onetime kingmaker of state Republican politics, former Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, who has said that Mr. Weld is 'without any real experience' in New York.

"Mr. Weld struck back in force, telling how their feud dated at least to a 1996 encounter in which Mr. D'Amato gave him $750,000 in donations for his Senate campaign that year against John Kerry of Massachusetts. The donations, according to Mr. Weld, came with an expletive-laced warning: that Mr. Weld distance himself from Robert S. Mueller III, who as a Justice Department official oversaw a federal fraud investigation of Mr. D'Amato's brother, Armand, in the early 1990's.

" 'If I ever see that expletive Mueller at an expletive fund-raiser, I'm going to get every expletive dollar of this back out of your hide,' Mr. Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, quoted Mr. D'Amato as saying."

There's continuing fallout from the "Red America" blogger quitting washingtonpost.com amid lots of evidence of plagiarism, as I reported here. Now Ben Domenech seems a bit teed off, telling Human Events:

"While I appreciated the opportunity to go and join the Washington Post, if they didn't expect the leftists were going to come after me with their sharpened knives, then they were fools."

Pressblogger Jay Rosen has some thoughts on finding a replacement:

"Now that Ben Domenech has officially resigned from the washingtonpost.com I hope Jim Brady will do the right thing, the creative thing, the thing that would turn this sorry episode around and allow the post.com to come out with a win in the blogosphere.

"An open competition on the Web to be the next political blogger at post.com, but instead of hiring one 'red state' person and leaving it at that (a strategic error in my opinion) Brady should say that three slots will be filled over the coming year. One from column right, one from column left, and a third voice that is definitely neither of those, which could mean libertarian -- or not.

"When I say open I mean open: anyone can apply. But experience as a political blogger counts. You have to be an original linker and be able to think for yourself. Finalists and semi-finalists are named. There's a week's try-out period for the final few and a big bake off at the end -- all with comments enabled. The competition would generate interest online, and give the winning bloggers a running start."