It would be nice if the liberal media could report some of the good news that this administration has helped generate.

Consider this. Iraq — during a time of constant terrorism and war — has produced a 70 percent turnout that even includes some of the radical groups who oppose the U.S. presence, and yet you get this headline from the Washington Post.

Experts Cautious in Assessing Iraq Election
High Turnout, Low Violence a Positive Step but Not a Turning Point, Analysts Say

Who are the analysts quoted? Well, Anthony Cordesman, a genuine security expert, and a couple of university analysts whose credentials are barely stated. President Bush is given a chance to applaud the results, but no Iraqi leader is quoted and none of the analysts who would talk about this as an historic event.
 
Could the headline not just as easily have said:

Iraqis Brave Threats of Violence in Historic Election
High Turnout, Low Violence a Positive Step but Analysts Disagree about Implications

This headline would be an objective one. Of course, any national paper could go out and find three or four analysts who would have called the election an important shift in the prospects for Iraq’s future. But that, too, could be construed as slanting the story unfairly. Given the ongoing violence, caution is justified — it just shouldn’t be the main thrust of this story. The news is that millions of Iraqis went out and voted. But the Post headline and the story are clearly slanted to downplay the positive, and one has to conclude that this is skepticism at work, not objective reporting.
 
It is precisely the litany of such stories on network news and in the media that has convinced millions of Americans to turn to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  I enjoy the commentary of both in doses, but I don’t consider their programs news show — they are op-ed on radio. And yet they are both providing needed perspective to a hungry audience because the mainstream media allows its liberal/anti-Bush bias to dictate its coverage.
 
For example, a week or so ago, I tuned into Chris Matthews, and sure enough in somber tones worthy of Frontline, Matthews and his reporter were doing an investigation into — you guessed — how the Bush administration misled the nation about weapons of mass destruction. Clips were unveiled as if they were some kind of startling new revelation, most of them taken out of context and presented as if Bush, Cheney, et. al, were intentionally hyping and misleading, which claim objective investigations have refuted.
 
We are talking about a sequence of events that occurred over three years ago. Since then it has been generally conceded that either the weapons did not exist, or if they did they were moved in the lead up to the liberation of Iraq. Virtually every reputable politician, investigator and intelligence group in the world believed Saddam and his regime harbored those weapons, and might well use them if an opportunity presented itself.
 
This was not a fantastic speculation conjured up from thin air, but a logical conclusion rooted in a somber analysis of his past behavior — he fired missiles at Israel during the first Gulf War, he used gas during the war with Iran, and then turned the gas on Kurdish and Shiite citizens in his own country. He refused to abide by the cessation of hostilities agreements he signed after he was ousted from Kuwait. And he had a record of murder and mayhem that made him one of the worst tyrants on the globe. He also had ties to Al Qaeda, though different researchers have different views about whether these were operational. I suspect — based on several reports — that they were not, but I don’t doubt they might have become operational in the not-to-distant future.
 
The point being — why is MSNBC pushing this story? The debate is two years old and has been investigated thoroughly by several oversight Congressional committees, which did not conclude that Bush or his administration misled or lied or even hyped intelligence. Can anyone doubt that Matthews, a known Democrat partisan, has an agenda? He is a liberal Rush Limbaugh, a guy who wears his biases out on his sleeve and occasionally slips up and asks a Democrat a tough question, but he is what he is — an instrument being used to challenge Bush. And yet he is allowed to use the huge resources of NBC News to essentially attack the President night after night.
 
As I wrote on this site only a few days ago, the polarization of the debate about the war on terror is unfortunate. Reasonable people can disagree, but they should base their conclusions on fairly evaluated real information provided by journalists who are not driven solely by their dislike of a given party or ideology or decision.
 
As a conservative, I have conceded — along with Andrew Sullivan, Bill Buckley and Charles Krauthammer — that this administration has made some serious mistakes in its handling of Iraq and the war on terror. It would be nice in turn if the liberal media could report — without bias — some of the good news that this administration has helped generate.