Read the rest here
Certainly the Haditha charges illustrate the "fundamental unseriouness" of the Abu Ghraib charges. You agree with Rush's take that although the Driveby Media can greiviously harass us, they cannot pull another scam on the order of the Nixon impeachment and subsequent abandonment of a cause to which the Kennedy-Johnson Democratic Party had gotten us well and truly committed.That theory presumes that SCOTUS will not allow or impose a Fairness Doctrine, which imposition is after all well under way with the approval by the Rhenquist court of McCain-Feingold. If we did not have the painful lessons of my entire adult lifetime before us, we would think that the fundamental unseriousness of the Driveby Media and its openly political wing, the Democrati Party, would have resulted in its being laughed out of adult discourse.
Instead we have to reckon with the fact that those who reach not only adulthood but great-grandparenthood often do so without becoming,in the sense you and I understand it, serious adult. So many remain, as Sowell would put it, enamored with the vision of their own virtue for merely being willing to rob Peter to give succor to Paul - without regard to the virtue by which Peter attained, or the vice which has probably contributed more to Paul's penury than anything else.
If the only thing that mattered was how journalists portrayed him in the papers and on TV, Ronald Reagan would never have attained the presidency or gotten things done once there. But although it is not true (as liberals consistently assume) that NOTHING actually matters except PR, it is painfully clear that PR does have its effect. There is no other way of explaining why adult political debates are not limited to debates between conservatism and libertarianism.