The fantasy war

Tom Donnelly at The Weekly Standard has Dissonance on Iraq (subtitle Cartoonish views of the war) up in which he looks into the Hollywood/liberals view of the Military and the situation in Iraq. In it he brings up a good point in that part of the problem with how it's viewed is the fact that people's minds are already made up on it. Most people don't really want to check out the milblogs to see what's going on. They most likely wouldn't believe you or I if we were to try to explain what we're seeing reported on security and political progress happening from the ground up. They would already "know" something completely different.

• The problem for Democrats is that their core belief that those fighting in Iraq are simply victims translates into a rhetorical kind of pity that strikes a military mind as condescending. Thus Sen. Barack Obama, in his otherwise soaring speech after his South Carolina primary win, sympathizing with "the soldier who doesn't know his child because he's on his third or fourth tour of duty." Or his opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, promising, on the same night, that "when we bring them home [from Iraq], we're going to take care of them. They have been neglected and ignored. . . . We're going to give them the health care and compensation and support they deserve to have."