All The News That's Fit To Quash
Jeff Jacoby wonders why the media prioritizes as it does:

The announcement on Oct. 25 that the first genuinely democratic national charter in Arab history had been approved by 79 percent of Iraqis was a major piece of good news. It confirmed the courage of Iraq's people and their hunger for freedom and decent governance. It advanced the US campaign to democratize a country that for 25 years had been misruled by a mass-murdering sociopath. It underscored the decision by Iraq's Sunnis, who had boycotted the parliamentary elections in January, to pursue their goals through ballots, not bullets. And it dealt a humiliating blow to the bombers and beheaders -- to the likes of Islamist butcher Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who earlier this year declared ''a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy" and threatened to kill anyone who took part in the elections....

But that isn't how the mainstream media saw it.

Consider The Washington Post. On the morning after the results of the Iraqi referendum were announced, the Post's front page was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, Lieutenant Colonel Leon James II, who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined ''Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and ''Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of US Deaths." A nearby graphic -- ''The Toll" -- divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service -- active duty, National Guard, and Reserves.

From Page 1, the stories jumped to a two-page spread inside, where they were illustrated with more photographs, a series of drawings depicting roadside attacks, and a large US map showing where each fallen soldier was from. On a third inside page, meanwhile, another story was headlined ''2,000th Death Marked by Silence and a Vow." It began: ''Washington marked the 2,000th American fatality of the Iraq war with a moment of silence in the Senate, the reading of the names of the fallen from the House floor, new protests, and a solemn vow from President Bush not to 'rest or tire until the war on terror is won.' " Two photos appeared alongside, one of Bush and another of antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan. And to give the body count a local focus, there was yet another story (''War's Toll Leaves Baltimore in Mourning") plus four pictures of troops killed in Iraq.

The Post didn't ignore the Iraqi election results. A story appeared on Page A13 (''Sunnis Failed to Defeat Iraq Constitution"), along with a map breaking down the vote by province. But like other leading newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, it devoted vastly more attention to the 2,000-death ''milestone," a statistic with no unique significance apart from the fact that it ends in round numbers.

Except, of course, for how incredibly ridiculously tiny of a number it is. If you didn't read blogs, you might've missed the Constitutional vote entirely.

My personal favorite was the NYT's clumsy, dragged out headline: "2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark". Defenders of the MSM's handling of the war often say that they believe the media has a responsibility to tell us "the whole story". So why aren't they outraged?

Update: What Marine Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr wrote in his letter to his girlfriend, found after he was killed in action:

Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

What the New York Times quoted:

Sifting through Corporal Starr's laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine's girlfriend. "I kind of predicted this," Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. "A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances."

Good thing they're out there reporting The Whole Story (TM). Scum. More despicable selective quoting stunts from the NYT at the link.

One thing should be obvious - you can't trust anything you read in the New York Times....

With that in mind, this email from a soldier addressing the NY Times reprinted at Michelle's site offers damn good advice:

Should I die in Iraq, on this, my third tour, my wife will have in her possesion, a letter from me to be released to the press, should some slimy dirtbag like you try to make it look like I served in anything other than an honorable manner.

Given the media's general filth, that'd be good advice for just about anyone, military or civilian. Apparently, the only way you'll get a correction is if you're alive to sue them. The old rule about documenting everything is still good, too: On the off chance you ever have to clear your name against some pencil-necked greaseball and it's a "he said/she said" situation, a good journal of your actions can be the evidence that tips the scale.

On A Rail
President of CBS News Andrew Heyward is out.

Heyward was under pressure to revive the news department, which trailed ABC and NBC for the past decade and was criticized for a "60 Minutes Wednesday'' report on President George W. Bush that was later discredited. The evening news broadcast has lost 5 percent of its viewers in the past year. CBS canceled "60 Minutes Wednesday,'' a show created by Heyward, in May.

Class B shares of Viacom, the No. 3 U.S. media company, fell 6 cents to $30.99 at 10:10 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have declined 15 percent this year....

This is a direct result of the aftermath of Ra^thergate, and comes just a week after praising television news performance on Hurricane Katrina, despite most of the main points of said coverage having already been proven false.

Breaking News!
This morning, I watched as CNN spent something on the order of 20 minutes with a camera on a little gray car in DC, loudly proclaiming that police were eventually going to "disrupt" a bomb which was allegedly inside. Eventually, they did, and the door blew open. This clip was replayed in slow motion about 10 times with commentary about how, wow, you can see the electrical charge in the blastbox used to set off the charge!

Later it turned out that the man claiming there was a bomb in his car also said he was best friends with President Bush and that Spiderman was trying to kill him.

Can someone explain to me why this was news? Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room later immediately cut to a scaffold collapse at Fenway Park in which no one, they already knew for certain, was injured. Is it in any way sensible to provide live coverage of any bomb scare or minor construction accident in any major city in America? Is there nothing else going on? Wake me when there's an actual bomb, you know? Until then I'll just go back to reading my news online.

We Have No Media
Put your feet down, lady.

In one of television's inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera - making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep.

This is really getting out of control. CNN in Somalia pales in comparison to, well, everybody during the Iranian "Revolution". Instapundit has more links.

Harsh New Orleans Winter
It appears that the claims of unbelievable toxicity in the New Orleans floodwaters were yet another media myth.

I guess it wouldn't be as toxic as they reported, given that it also didn't contain the 10,000 corpses that they reported. As they say, everything you see on the news is absolutely true except for any story of which you have firsthand knowledge.

He's On A Mission From God
God told me to find that Blues Brothers cassette yesterday:

President George Bush has claimed he was told by God to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden's stronghold of Afghanistan as part of a divine mission to bring peace to the Middle East, security for Israel, and a state for the Palestinians.

The President made the assertion during his first meeting with Palestinian leaders in June 2003, according to a BBC series which will be broadcast this month.

The band, W! The band! What's hilarious is that the Independent cites a BBC press release as fact. It seems like I was taught even in my high school journalism class to never, ever do that sort of thing. Worse yet, what was the BBC's source?

In the programme Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."

Yeah, that doesn't sound made up at all. This isn't even a new claim: This was a popular leftist meme years ago, right up there with the one where Bush forces Blair to pray with him. Aren't these the same guys who cooked up the Jenin "massacre", also known as "Weekend At Bernie's III"? Of course, it's hard enough to find a truthful claim from the BBC or the Palestinians, nevermind when they're working together (or when they're "waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people" as one BBC journalist proclaimed):

The White House has dismissed as "absurd" allegations made in a BBC TV series...

Of course, as Dan Rather would say, it doesn't really matter if the quote is true or not, it's the important questions that it raises that we should be worried about, right? British taxpayer dollars at work. Nice of them to hold the press release until it could be used as an attempt to undermine Bush's speech, though.

Maybe Bush should start doing this kind of thing. You know, get a BBC reporter alone, off the record, and whisper to them "Ya know, sometimes, God tells me to step on puppies. Heh. Heh. Heh." Then when the BBC reporter tries to repeat it, dismiss them as a nutcase. What good is the media if we can't abuse it for our own personal amusement?

Update: Heh.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has denied an account by another Palestinian official of a meeting with US President George Bush...

So, the BBC (and all the British media sources which cited them) couldn't be bothered to ask the White House or even other Palestinian officials to verify their source? If the BBC ran a piece like this about me, I'd be meeting with an attorney by dawn. Meanwhile, Scott Burgess analyzes British newspapers:

The Guardian account, illustrated with a sophomoric photograph of Mr. Bush apparently surrounded by a halo ("aren't we clever?") epitomises that newspaper's general approach to the news, characteristically combining typographical error, inaccuracy and incompleteness with a complete disregard for even the tiniest sop to reportorial balance.

That's what I've come to expect from pretty much every newspaper on the island except The Telegraph and The Scotsman.

Media Doesn't Care About Black People
Remember how Dan Rather loved the coverage of New Orleans so much that he dubbed it "one of television news' finest moments"? You know, the stuff that turned out to be totally false? Well, one newspaper has an explanation:

Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

Is the Times-Picayune asserting that their shoddy reporting is FEMA or Bush's fault for not forcing middle-class people to stay in the city or something equally bizarre, or are they accusing poor blacks of being liars by nature? Either way, how would that absolve them of their responsibility to check out rumors before they report them as facts?

Just, wow. As Ace says:

I will be God-damned to hell before I ever put up with another MSM scolding about how "irresponsible" bloggers are in their reportage and commentary.

I crossed that threshhold months ago, and laughed out loud when Wolf Blitzer tried to take potshots during his hurricane coverage. Jim Amoss should be fired, unless the media got that quote wrong, too. (Via Kallini Brothers)

Mary Maroon
Stuck on Stupid: Former CBS Wicked Witch of the West Mary Mapes still has no idea what hit her. These people never learn.

Storm Spin
An official State of Louisiana government vehicle carrying Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco has been trapped by the rapidly rising floodwaters.


WHERE IS FEMA, MAN?!

Seriously, though, there's this article:

Charles said he didn't want to get on the evacuation busses because he didn't want to leave Houston.

What headline does the AFP give it?

Houston abandons its neediest ahead of Hurricane Rita

Yeah! They abandoned them with a free ride out! Or something.

Cindy Sheehan's Last Friend
The New York Times.

Many New Yorkers said yesterday that Ms. Sheehan gave them back hope that was lost when war was declared on Iraq.

Who needs a direct quote?

Dan Rather Admires Bumbling Incompetence
Good God, man! Stop talking!

Rather praised the coverage of Hurricane Katrina by the new generation of TV journalists and acknowledged that he would have liked to have reported from the Gulf Coast. "Covering hurricanes is something I know something about," he said.

"It's been one of television news' finest moments," Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

Shame half of it was proven wrong, huh, Dan?

Everything Reporters Know Is Wrong
After last night's Presidential address (which I'll write more about later), ABC News' Dean Reynolds interviewed some African-America Katrina survivors at the Astrodome, probing for anti-Bush sentiment. The nice lady they selected for the interview wasn't exactly the next Cindy Sheehan.

Reynolds: "I'd like to get the reaction of Connie London, who spent several horrible hours at the Superdome. You heard the President say repeatedly that you are not alone, that the country stands beside you. Do you believe him?"

London: "Yeah, I believe him because here in Texas they have truly been good to us. I..."

Reynolds: *yanks microphone away* "Did you get a sense of hope that you could return to your home one day in New Orleans?"

London: "Yes I did, I did."

Reynolds: "Did... Did you harbor any anger towards the President because of the slow federal response?"

London: "No, none whatsoever, because I feel like our city and our state government should've been there before the federal government was called in. They should've been on their jobs."

Reynolds: *frustrated* "...and they weren't?!"

London: "No, no, no, no! Lord they wasn't! I mean, they had RTA buses, Greyhound buses, school buses that was just sitting there going underwater!"

The interview goes on to the rest of the group, and it turns out Reynolds can't even find anybody to get mad at Bush for him. London jumps back in to blame Mayor Nagin personally for misspending the money the federal government gave them to fix the levees. Of course, if, like NPR, you take the time to line up people who agree with you and edit their responses instead of broadcasting live, you can get the answers you want. As the saying goes, every claim made by the media is absolutely accurate unless you happen to have any firsthand knowledge of it. I love that "has the President stopped beating his wife yet" line of questioning from Reynolds, though. (Via Instapundit)

"Actually, now that we think about it..."
The New York Times editorial page.

July 14th, 1993:

The billions of Federal dollars spent to construct dams and levees have doubtless prevented billions of dollars of damage to the areas they serve. But a dam or a levee in one place creates problems somewhere else. Also, by offering protection, they encourage people to live and work and develop farming in flood plains that are inherently risky.

Budget constraints and environmental concerns have slowed new flood control projects in recent years. Congress should resist pressure to spend more now because of this year's floods; these projects need closer evaluation than they've gotten in the past.

May 9th, 1997:

In the last session of Congress, a small band of Republican moderates organized by Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York succeeded in blocking nearly every attempt by their right-wing colleagues to gut the country's basic environmental statutes....On Wednesday, in the first major environmental battle of the new Congress, the moderates and like-minded Democrats beat back a bill that would have permanently exempted any flood control project from the requirements of the Endangered Species Act.

April 13th, 2005:

The bill would shovel $17 billion at the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and other water-related projects...Among these projects is a $2.7 billion boondoggle on the Mississippi River that has twice flunked inspection by the National Academy of Sciences.

The Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs accuse the corps of routinely inflating the economic benefits of its projects. And environmentalists blame it for turning free-flowing rivers into lifeless canals and destroying millions of acres of wetlands -- usually in the name of flood control and navigation but mostly to satisfy Congress's appetite for pork.

This is a bad piece of legislation.

September 1st, 2005:

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level....Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?

How do these people sleep at night? (Via EU Rota)

CBS Reacts
CBS News, like a dinosaur that needs a walnut-sized brain in their tail, responds to Rathergate a year later:

After a controversial run-in with bloggers last year that helped sink "60 Minutes Wednesday," CBS has hired a "nonbudsman" to write a blog that will go behind the scenes at the news division.

Former "Hotline" editor Vaughn Ververs will report his findings on "Public Eye," which debuts next month on the CBS News Web site.

Ververs will be a kind of media reporter, mostly focused on CBS News, reporting and writing about how the news is gathered, produced and placed. In addition to providing Journalism 101, "Public Eye" also could offer extended versions of segments that appeared on CBS, interviews with correspondents and producers and maybe even the daily story meeting for the "CBS Evening News."

Although he's a CBS employee, Ververs doesn't answer to CBS News president Andrew Heyward. His boss is CBS digital-media head Larry Kramer, who has a long career in journalism. Ververs has no power to change policy or the direction of stories.

"I'm not here to set the rules," Ververs said. "I'm not even here to voice my opinion. That's not my job."

Then what is his job?

"It's going to be an honest, fair, unvarnished look at what we do, and that means that it's an experiment," Heyward said. "It's a risk. Not everybody approves of what we do. But I'm banking on the fact that people will also see how much effort we make about being fair and being ethical."

In an interview last week at CBSNews.com's headquarters, Ververs acknowledged that it's up to him to show right off the bat that he's neither a network apologist nor a media critic. He's not going to softball anyone, and if CBS News deserves the heat, it's going to get it--but the network or correspondents aren't obligated to talk to him, either.

But Ververs pointed to the enthusiastic support given by Kramer and Heyward to provide transparency to the often-insular world of broadcast news. In the wake of the discredited "60 Minutes Wednesday" report about President Bush's service in the National Guard, CBS News was criticized for not being immediately forthcoming after questions about the reporting emerged.

In fact, they were criticized for outright lying about the nature of the questions, lying about the evidence to back them up, and allowing their reporter to continue to insist, even after feigning a public apology, that he was right and the entire thinking universe was wrong.

Kramer thinks that in the case of last year's "Memogate" involving Dan Rather and "60 Minutes Wednesday," something like "Public Eye" would have been useful.

"It would help a news organization deal with controversy because it brings it out into the open," Kramer said. "If you believe, as I do, that we're an honest, hard-working news organization, all you need to do is have the ability to explain how you do what you do, and they'll understand."

"He's a combination of a good reporter and the host of a talk show," Kramer said. "The concept is for him to really moderate a debate...That requires asking the right questions and being persistent."

I think the term they're looking for here is "lightning rod".

Welcome to the thunderdome, Ververs! Bwahahahaha!

The Made-Up Media War At Home
Holy crap.

CARBONDALE, Ill. - For two years, Carbondale residents have been riveted by the writing of a little girl imploring her father in Iraq: "Don't die, OK?"

The Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University's student-run newspaper, today will admit to its readers that the saga - of a little girl's published letters to her father serving in Iraq - was apparently an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a woman who claimed to be the girl's aunt.

In fact, the newspaper will report today, the man identified as the girl's father was never in Iraq, and it was the woman who apparently wrote the letters and regular columns that were published under the little girl's name - and even impersonated the girl in telephone interviews.

At one point, a little girl even showed up in the newsroom claiming to be not just the girl, but then the girl's twin sister.

But in hindsight, several staffers said Thursday, the girl was painfully shy in person, and would seldom talk. Yet when she called the newsroom on the phone, said current student editor Zack Creglow, "she talked so much that we'd pass the phone around the newsroom."

"That part creeped me out so much last night that I couldn't sleep," Creglow said Thursday. "No one really knew what Kodee's voice sounded like, she was so shy (in person). Now it looks like it was this woman (on the phone) talking in a little kid's voice."

A man with a crew-cut visited the office claiming to be the father on furlough, and the story finally collapsed when, to top off their hoax, they claimed the father had been killed, at which point cursory research demonstrated that not only had no one by the father's alleged name been killed in Iraq, but, that the man didn't appear to be serving at all.

Already suspicious, several staffers and former staffers - including Brenner, the former reporter, and Creglow, the current editor - attended a memorial that Kodee's "aunt" arranged in the Carbondale area. At the small, informal event, they looked at photos of a man presented as Kodee's father - but who, they noted, looked nothing like the man they'd once met in the newsroom.

In two years, the Daily Egyptian could apparently never be bothered to factcheck the story.

Follow the link to read some of the published "letters", including the one to President Bush: "I'm rily mad at you and you make my hart hurt...I don't think your doing a very good job. You keep sending soldiers to Iraq and it's not fair."

This is just... Yuck.

Update: This crazy bint took somebody's kid for this?!

By Tuesday night, Michael Brenner was pacing nervously outside a Dairy Queen in Cartersville, Ill., talking to Hastings on his cell phone. He handed the phone to a Tribune reporter and Hastings said she would come to the Dairy Queen and listen to questions.

Hastings pulled into the parking lot in the same red car she'd driven to the memorial service. She was told the military was denying Kennings' existence and that the name Colleen Hastings appeared in no public records databases in Illinois. She was asked for a driver's license and for a death certificate for Kennings. With each question, Hastings shook her head no.

And then she drove off into the night.

The Tribune traced the license plate of Hastings' car, and by Wednesday afternoon, a reporter was outside a home in Marion, Ill., looking for a woman named Jaimie Reynolds.

Sitting on the back porch of her house wearing a maroon, long-sleeved Southern Illinois University shirt, her face flush from crying, Reynolds admitted she had pretended to be Colleen Hastings. She said Dan Kennings was invented, and those who met him had actually met a friend of hers who agreed to play the role.

She said, and the Tribune confirmed, that she was a broadcast journalism student at Southern Illinois. She graduated in 2004, putting her there alongside the very people she was deceiving.

Reynolds said the scheme was [reporter] Brenner's idea.

"Mike is my best friend," she said. "In the last couple of years, he's had a hard time with his career. He asked me if I would help him out. I said I would. It just got a little bigger than he told me it would. I went with it because supposedly he was my best friend. This needs to be over with. I don't want to lie anymore. He just wouldn't let it go."

She also said she fell in love with Brenner, making it that much harder for her to stop the lie.

"Jesus Christ, that is completely not true," Brenner said when he heard about the allegations. "Obviously she is making that up. I swear I'm telling the truth. The last two years of my life, I don't know what to believe. It's ridiculous. I feel stabbed in the back. They had an elaborate hoax. I'm telling the truth."

On Thursday, 10-year-old Caitlin Hadley sat between her parents on a couch in the Nazarene church they run in Montpelier, Ind. She retold the two-year odyssey that began with her believing she was going to be the star of documentary film about a little girl named Kodee.

"It was sort of weird, but I had a lot of fun," Caitie said.

"I just realized that I didn't know this girl (Jaimie Reynolds)," said [mother] Tawnya Hadley. "In the profession that my husband is in, we move and meet new people all the time. What if she'd never brought Caitie back? We feel like we're idiots."

The Hadleys lived in Buffalo, Ky., when Reynolds started making the five- or six-hour drive from Carbondale to pick Caitie up and bring her to southern Illinois.

Caitie said that when she and Reynolds were with other people, Reynolds said they were "filming." Caitie was to pretend to be Kodee, and "she said I needed to act like a tomboy because Kodee was a tomboy."

Caitie's understanding was that everybody she met in Carbondale was in the movie, which was being filmed by hidden cameras. So when they went into the Daily Egyptian newsroom the first time, she pretended to be Kodee, and believed the reporters and editors were playing along as characters.

"I met all the people she had in the movie," Caitie said. "We were always on camera, but I didn't see any cameras."

I don't even know what to say. Sick, sick, sick.

Update: Well, I guess Brenner has nothing to worry about: Fellow Illinois student newspaper fake-news-runner Mariam Sobh just got a job at NPR. The jokes write themselves, people.

Made-Up Media
Your helping of bias-free news from the New York Times, the Associated Press, and, er, the New York Times again.

The Media Inquisitor
Heh, during a special on Pope Benedict XVI, CNN just referred to the violence of the terroristic Soviet-driven riots in 60's/70's Europe as "protests for social change and justice". Yes, with a straight face, and while acknowledging full well that they were Marxist.

What liberal media?

Have Cake, Eat It Too
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen ponders the collapse of the journalism mythology:

What I have lately been trying to say to my colleagues in J-school is clearer to me now, after the panel in San Antonio. Here is what I believe. The official religion has run out of gas...."making a difference" was never a good enough standard for teaching or doing journalism. It was a lazy idea, the press putting one over on itself. For the liberal journalists and professors who were the believers in make-a-difference journalism were babied by their profession, and their J-school training, which allowed them to believe in agenda-less journalism at the same time....in fact, they wanted the innocence (we do just the facts journalism) and the power (we do make a difference journalism) but this could never be. We in the J-schools failed to catch that. The people on a mission never got around to justifying their mission in the language of democratic politics. They talked about it as a neutral public service instead, but speaking truth to power isn't neutral, and making a difference isn't just a service to others. We in the J-schools didn't do well with that, either.

...and Jay, who's far more qualified to think about it than I, has no idea what to teach instead.

What He Meant To Say Was...
The New York Times "covers" (for?) the Air America scandal:

An article yesterday about state and city investigations of a loan made by a Bronx social service agency to the liberal radio network Air America quoted incorrectly from comments made on the air by Al Franken...Mr. Franken said: "I don't know why they did it, and I don't know where the money went. I don't know if it was used for operations, which I imagine it was. I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul." (He did not say: "I don't know why he did it. I don't know where the money went. I don't know if it was used for operations. I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.")

Maybe borrowing. Probably robbing. Hey, you say tomato...

Wolf Oblivious
It's good to know that liberal media figureheads have their talking points in order, even if they're totally oblivious to what's going on around them, as Jason at Counter-Column notes:

The explosion flipped the 31-ton troop carrier over and caused it to burst into flames...And what is Wolf Blitzer's argument? That the military didn't provide good vehicles in the Al Anbar Province. And that -- and I quote verbatim, -- "an up-armored Humvee would have stood a better chance."

A blast powerful enough to flip a 31-ton armored vehicle would've wiped a 4-ton Humvee off the map, uparmored or not. Even riding around in a main battle tank probably wouldn't do you a lot of good against an unusual, monster shaped charge like that, and a general, who knows a lot more about warfare than Wolf, was trying to make exactly that point.

The retired general was being too diplomatic to tell Blitzer he was being a moron, but Blitzer kept pressing the point. "I'm very disappointed that we don't have the good vehicles in the Al Anbar province," he says. "It's a very sensitive issue for me, because I was there in March."

Yeah, Wolf. How was the ride to the hotel?

Remember the good old days when journalists had beats, and actually knew something about them? The days before "journalism school", when journalism was something you did after you understood something about the world? (Or was Wolf deliberately being obtuse for the benefit of pushing the network agenda on ill-informed viewers?)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go bombing around Paris in my enchanted M1 Abrahams tank...

...the BBC is hovering between adequate and truly dire, with dreary hackneyed commentary filled with technical errors. Are the BBC incapable of finding a few ex-military people to employ who might know that there is no such thing as an 'Abrahams' battle tank?

...which is, as any journalist will tell you, impervious to all mortal weapons, including neutron bombs!