To the victor go the spoils

By Carter Fletcher

To all the war protesters, Bush-haters, mainstream media folks, Democratic presidential candidates and liberals, I'm sorry to have to bring you all this bad news. We are winning stunningly in Iraq, the people not closely associated with the murderous Saddam Hussein regime are downright jubilant to see American troops and tanks where they used to see Gestapo-like secret police and torturers, and the economy here at home has excellent prospects. It must really be getting you guys down.

The war protesters are still out there protesting a war that's over, vowing to go on. (I might suggest, since they're protesting things that are now history, why not lump Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and Afghanistan in with them and call it an all-war demonstration? Makes more sense than protesting one action that's over. More bang for the banner, don't you know?) And they are still getting news coverage from ABC, CNN, C-SPAN and NPR. Too bad the crowds are dwindling. They seem to be much smaller than the groups coming out to celebrate the amazing feat of arms our excellent military personnel have carried off.

The Democratic presidential candidates (yes, there are some, in case you've forgotten, and, no, I can't remember who all of them are either) can't get any air time and don't have anything to say when they do. After one of them, Sen.John Kerry (the senator from Big Ketchup), made a nasty crack about the Bush administration and barely survived the condemnations, the rest of them are scared to attack the president in time of war and can't really get any traction for any of their other whinings about education and the environment. This war thing has really got them stymied.

Liberals in general have been forced to resort to the "I'm against the war, but I support the troops" nonsense. That's like saying, "I'm against football, but I root for the Cowboys." Luckily, for most of them, saying contradictory or totally foolish things doesn't bother them much anymore -- not after all the practice they've had.

But the news media! Alas, you really have to feel sorry for them. As Laura Ingraham said recently regarding the TV images of Saddam's statue falling into the streets of Baghdad, she hadn't "seen Judy Woodruff's [of CNN] face look so ashen since the night it was announced that Bush had won the 2000 election."

The folks at the Media Research Center did an online poll last week asking participants to vote on what media personality was most depressed by our victory in Iraq. ABC's Peter Jennings won going away, trouncing Peter Arnett by 73 percent to 17 percent.

CBS's Dan Rather should be fairly depressed also, since CBS News was able to actually lose viewership share during a war, though Rather was still able to stay on message -- if anyone could figure out what that was, other than "it's as loose as an axle-joint on a '57 Chevy pickup."

Evan Thomas of Newsweek, who again, as in Afghanistan, predicted a "military quagmire" and "heavy loss of life" in Iraq, has now come out with his predictions of doom and gloom about the postwar rebuilding of Iraq. That seems to have become the next great hope of the mainstream boys and girls. What they haven't figured out yet is that a country that sits on more oil than Saudi Arabia and one that has enough arable land to be self-sufficient in food is definitely starting with jacks or better. And, unlike the snobbery and elitism of the East Coast and West Coast media types, I actually think the Iraqis are smart enough to form a parliamentary government when the AK-47s have been removed from their ears and they think their wives and families are safe from torture. After all, if the French can do it É .

The mainstream also tried to focus on the civilian casualties, but too many Iraqis have already gone on camera to testify to the numbers of Iraqis killed every week by Saddam's henchmen. There were also those inconvenient pictures of the Iraqi torture chambers which made the great unwashed masses of American TV viewers come to the conclusion that, weapons of mass destruction or not, Saddam was really an evil guy who deserves what he gets. A lot of those viewers came quickly to the conclusion that, even if several thousand civilians were casualties of the fight to end the Saddam regime, that was probably only equivalent to the number Saddam himself would have killed in a month.

Heck, the media even got shut out of a good story at the Masters by a guy named Hootie, who not only pulled the plug on showing Martha Burk's band of few-but-merry feminazis, but also showed the tournament to us without commercials. Man, that was bad precedent all the way around.

So, for now, the poor media will have to lick its wounds, because our soldiers not only ran over the Iraqi army, but they also kicked the media's posteriors.

But I warn you: When the left-wing media get marginalized, they get weird. Take for instance the Media Research Center's award for top "stupid liberal media quote" for 2002. It comes from none other than PBS's Bill Moyers right after the Republicans won back the Senate in the 2002 elections:

"The entire federal government -- the Congress, the executive, the courts -- is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate. That agenda includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to surrender control over their own lives. It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. É So it's a heady time in Washington. A heady time for piety, profits and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money."

Please note that last sentence, and let me explain. Moyers thinks all those things are bad, especially as long as he can continue to get air time on PBS paid for by your tax dollars. But if you happen to think "piety, profits and military power" are not necessarily evil, well ... you must be listening to talk radio.

Carter Fletcher, a political consultant from Gideon, Mo.,is a regular contributor to tcommonconservative.com, where this commentary first appeared.