As expected, today’s extraordinary front page article in the New York Times on progress in Iraq is causing aneurysms across wide swathes of the left-wing blogosphere. You might think the news that “the security improvements in most neighborhoods are real” might be cause for bipartisan celebration, or at least cautious optimism. Think again. Instead, left wing bloggers are doing everything in their power to deny or disparage the gains that our soldiers are making–with increasingly little concern for intellectual honesty of their arguments. It seems they’re determined to prove right Senator Joe Lieberman, who warned earlier this month that Democrats today are “emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq”–regardless of the evidence. Consider this gem from Daily Kos, posted this morning in response to the Times piece.
Clever stuff, no? The only problem: the Kos quotes are spectacularly out of context.
Consider the article from 2005, drawn from the Telegraph. It’s true it does contain the line, “The amazing realisation is that somehow normal life continues.” But here’s what precedes it: “The people of Baghdad do not need statistics to tell them that they are living through terror unimaginable in the West. “Every two days for the past two years more civilians have died in Iraq than in the July 7 London bombings. “Just yesterday, 31 people lost their lives in several attacks across the country, which included gunmen shooting dead three Sunni Arab members of the team drafting Iraq’s new constitution; insurgents slaughtering 10 workers on a bus travelling to a US army base, and gunmen ambushing a police vehicle in northern Mosul, killing two.” And here’s what follows it:
By contrast, here’s the Times today:
Of course, the left-wing nutroots live in their own self-contained universe. The real question: are congressional Democrats really going to stay in the bunker with them through November 2008?
