The MSM

There seems to be an increasingly common attempt by Kos and Atrios to ascribe motives to mainstream news reports that I think simply don't exist. In all the coverage of Petraeus last week, reporters simply pointed out that Bush seemed to stop the bleeding and that consequently no more Republicans had stepped forward to publicy break with the Bush administration over the war in Iraq. I certainly didn't take from any of the coverage that anyone thought public support for the war would turn around. And the general consensus view of the Moveon ad was that it gave Republicans something to talk about. As the devil herself explained:

MoveOn.org provided Republicans a life raft when it ran a full-page newspaper advertisement Monday taunting Petraeus as 'General Betray Us.'

Now of course it's true that the events of last week didn't move public sentiment on the war at all. But to argue that Beltway reporters shouldn't have been pointing out that the two most newsworthy things that happened was that the left fairly clumsily let Moveon characterize it's response to Petraeus in the form of a newspaper ad and that Republicans decided to stay on the sinking ship of Bush's Iraq policy at least a little while longer begs the question: what should they have reported on?

Yes, I found it just as annoying as everyone else that while the war remains unpopular as ever we have to hear how Bush may have yet again won a battle over extending our troop presence. But like it or not, until the Democrats can come up with an alternative that could overcome a Republican filibuster and Bush veto (in short, 67 votes in the senate) then the Republicans will get to have their little war for the forseeable future.