The MSM is a joke! We let these people bully us into silence in the late 60s and 70s. The silent majority is not silent anymore and we will protect our troops at home while they protect us abroad. Get those yard signs out, redecorate your car, fly your flag at home, change your answering machine to note that Freedom doesn't come free, buy a serviceman lunch or dinner, look to help a family wiht a person deployed; Be polite but don't shrink from countering anti-Iraq war chit-chat.
People said the the Vietnam war tore families apart...It was the MSM's portraial of the war that tore the families apart. This guy in Iraq is trying to utilize Gen Mihns strategy after his defeat at Tet...hang in there til we beat ourselves....NOT going to happen...the U.S. Homefront must rise to the challenge and rise now!!!!

Unfortunately, in a war, invisible things like psyco-metrics are leading indicators. Casualties are trailing indicators. It is impossible for a left leaning news editor to see thru his own political filters to the realities of the psyco-metrics on the ground in Iraq.

42nd ID had 4,800 calls to the JCC tip lines in the first 2 weeks of August. If the folks in Salahadin are ratting out the terrorists like it is going out of style, Al Anbar can't be that far behind.

Colonel Jassam missed one point, the insurgents have to maintain support among their own people.

Why would you expect cowardly reporters to get it right, heck they won't even leave the relative comfort of the Hilton Hotel.
The problem is perception and a lack of leadership at the White House.
They continue to let idiots like Michael Moore get the jump on them in the PR battle, and that is what this is.
The Republicans have the wrong people working for them.
James Carville is actually in charge of their PR responses.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Personally, I think it looks more like the decades long campaigns against the American Indians. Consider these passages from Robert Utley's book Frontier Regulars -

Chapter 3: The Problem of Doctrine. “Three special conditions set this mission apart from more orthodox military assignments. First, it pitted the army against an enemy who usually could not be clearly identified and differentiated from kinsmen not disposed at the moment to be enemies. Indians could change with bewildering rapidity from friend to foe to neutral, and rarely could one be confidently distinguished from another...Second, Indian service placed the army in opposition to a people that aroused conflicting
emotions... And third, the Indians mission gave the army a foe unconventional both in the techniques and aims of warfare... He fought on his own terms and, except when cornered or when his
family was endangered, declined to fight at all unless he enjoyed overwhelming odds...These special conditions of the Indian mission made the U.S. Army not so much a little army as a big police force...for a century the army tried to perform its unconventional mission with conventional organization and methods. The result was an Indian record that contained more failures than successes and a lack of preparedness for
conventional war that became painfully evident in 1812, 1846, 1861, and 1898.

Chapter 4. The Army, Congress, and the People. Sherman’s frontier regulars endured not only the physical isolation of service at remote border posts; increasingly in the postwar years they found themselves isolated in attitudes, interests, and spirit from other institutions of government and society and, indeed from the American people themselves...Reconstruction plunged the army into tempestuous partisan politics. The frontier service removed it largely from physical proximity to population and, except for an occasional Indian conflict, from public awareness and interest. Besides public and congressional indifference and even hostility, the army found its Indian attitudes and policies condemned and opposed by the civilian officials concerned with Indian affairs and by the nation’s humanitarian community.

The MSM are turning in to "Little Johnny One-Notes". They have one argument: Iraq is like VietNam. To them VietNam is like a magic charm. They "won" the war for the American public opinion back then (leading to our disgraceful withdrawal from VietNam), so I guess they think they can once again invoke the old "VietNam" magic.

Unfortunately, it seems like the MSM ARE getting to the Pentagon brass, based on some of the pronouncements that have been coming out of Washington in recent weeks. However, the American people as a whole seem to be "all in" on this war -- if only the Bush Administration/the Pentagon would take their gloves off and stop requiring our men to follow the absurd Marquis de Queensbury rules of engagement with which they are currently encumbered.

IMO, the MSM is trying to control the government.
Their success regarding Vietnam emboldened them and gave them the impression that they could control a president and cause success or failure of policies by how they covered those policies.

It's pretty scary, actually.