Blogoland

This post should be linked to by a million other blogs. Read it all:

Yes, the time for sobriety and seriousness and the end to the spin and bullshit is now, before it's too late. Again, the hackery and triumphalist imbecility must cease, and the sooner the better, so we can move forward clear-eyed about the real situation at hand, rather than laboring under rosy-lensed misconceptions like blind, hyper-Panglossian cretins. Or maybe people aren't blind, but worse, talk radio like partisans who have gotten accustomed to their cheery little echo-chambers, to their jingo-on-the-go adoring commenters, and to the juicy partisan traffic that comes their way as a result. But it's a sad, deluded little party, and they're the real losers, because they are lying to their readers, and they are lying to themselves.

Holy crap. Wonder if Glenn Reynolds links to this? I'm guessing no.

Reminds me of George Packer's brilliant little passage in Assasins' Gate, which dissected completely the irrelevence and stupidity of the partisan (both Left and Right) mud-slinging regarding Iraq:

From the prewar period to the invasion into the occupation and insurgency, an ascendant, triumphalist right, and a weakened, querulous left took more interest and pleasure in the other's defeats than in the condition of Iraq or Iraqis. In this country, Iraq was almost always about winning the argument.

Get it? This is not a game. We must get it right. If Iraq is spinning out of control, we must do something to stop it, and not pretend that all the problems are somehow manufactured by the Evil Media reporting All the Bad News.