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Two little stories worth looking at together. The first one is a Gallup poll that shows Americans are now evenly split on whether the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over. This is down from a high of 76% to 19% back in April. The same poll shows Bush’s approval rating down to 50% with 47% disapproval.

The second story is from The Hill. I bi-partisan congressional group has returned from a three day trip to Iraq and discovered the Press are seriously slanting the news. The Hill article quotes almost exclusively from the Democrats and we get things like this:

“Some of the media reports led him[Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.)] to believe that “it was Vietnam revisited,” he said. But he said there was “a disconnect between the reporting and the reality.”

Marshall also claimed that there now are only 27 reporters in Iraq, down from 779 at the height of the war. “The reporters that are there are all huddled in a hotel. They are not getting out and reporting,” he told The Hill.

He added, ‘The good news is not being reported in the conventional press.’”

“Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee’s ranking member, said, “The media stresses the wounds, the injuries, and the deaths, as they should, but for instance in Northern Iraq, Gen. [Dave] Petraeus has 3,100 projects — from soccer fields to schools to refineries — all good stuff and that isn’t being reported.””

What they didn’t get into was why the press was like this. It could be they are just lazy, but I suspect something more basic. I suspect they want us to loose. Sitting in their hotel, wearing their “Not My President” , “Selected, not Elected” buttons - more than anything they want the United States to fail. They relish every soldier killed and secretly hope for some massive attack that forces public opinion down to the point we pull out like Bill Clinton did in Somalia. But, in the mean time, they just present one bad thing after another because it’s working. The sheep I call Americans are starting to believe we are on the run in Iraq and get the feeling we should get out.

I hate the press – I really do.