The Fawning Of A Candidate

I don't recall the last time that the three major TV networks sent their anchors on a foreign visit by a candidate for the presidency. The mainstream media seems to have lost their memory about what has been happening in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 18 months.
If my memory serves me well, all of the Democratic leadership in both houses of Congress stated that the surge could not possibly succeed. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., stated that we had already lost the war, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., stated, "By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working. Even if the figures were right, the conclusion is wrong."
Last year when General David Petraeus reported on the situation in Iraq before Congress, he was held up in ridicule by most of the Democrats as indicated by the previous quote. Since the war has been going well for many months, the media has lost interest in reporting the news from the two fronts.
President George Bush stated weeks ago that if events continued to improve in Iraq, brigades could possibly be rotated back to the states. He also has been applying pressure on NATO allies to increase their troop commitment to the fight in Afghanistan since NATO is the main headquarters.
Now, after Sen. Barack Obama went to Afghanistan and said that we needed to send more troops and that Afghanistan was the key fight against terrorism. The media reported this as though no one had ever considered additional troops. In Iraq he reported that the Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in agreement with him about withdrawing our troops in 16 months after the first of the year. There is some doubt if the prime minister truly wants that particular timetable.
The lack of military understanding by the senator is obvious, and yet Obama is rarely asked difficult questions on that subject or any other. Katie Couric tried on Tuesday night when she asked if the security in Iraq would have improved without the surge. He refused to answer the question directly and kept saying that his proposal for more pressure politically on the Iraqis may have been successful if tried.
The bias by the media has been apparent in the past, but now there can be no doubt. The media are truly cheerleaders for the Obama candidacy. Since this is the first black major party nominee, they want to be thought of as being present when history is made and, if possible, to contribute to it. As an analogy, in combat we called those who wanted to be thought of as contributing to a significant military event as "strap hangers." They showed up after most of the danger had subsided and definitely wanted to be gone before dark.
When Obama spoke to the media following meetings in other parts of the Middle East, he talked as though nothing had happened diplomatically in the past many years. One could get the felling that he was the first to realize that there were difficulties in the area and that Israel needed to be supported. I listened to some of his responses and they added nothing to a better understanding of the situation, and yet the media were enthralled.