FWIW, I think W's down in the polls because of his stance on immigration and the loss of support from the base. But, what do I know?
The American Media, by and large, are trying to sway the next two elections to their team. The best way to do this is to damage the administration and the Republican Congress. The best way to do this is to convince the American people that Iraq is a failure. The best way to do that is to declare defeat and force a retreat. Normally, any winning political strategy is fair enough. But to employ a winning domestic political strategy without regard for the consequences to the American people, whose children will be slaughtered at the hands of ascendant Jihadists (among a series of other consequences) is not only wrong, but just plain evil.
The media have, by and large, allied with the Jihadists in the hope that the Jihadists' victory in Iraq will win their party the White House and Congress. The media simply cannot resist the temptation to test their power in the service of a domestic political agenda.
The journalists I've met here have, to a man, all been Democrats, and all have railed against the Bush administration and have, with much hope in their eyes, predicted failure for America in Iraq. They all come here intending to shill for their party, and then they all shill for their party. They give Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents hope, they stoke the financial and recruitment fires of the international Jihad Machine.
It's all very simple. They are in huge measure, directly responsible for the ongoing death toll of Americans in Iraq. Everyone here in Iraq, the Islamic world at large, and most especially the Jihadist Movement's leadership, follow the American media closely, in order to monitor the American people's headspace, primarily with regard to whether or not we will continue the fight on to the establishment of a successful democratic, capitalistic, and modernized society here, or whether we will run in self-imposed defeat. The morale of the International Jihad Movement is almost entirely dependent on the posture of the American media. Their strategies, indeed, are primarily determined by it as well. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1644762/posts