Silflay Hraka

The White House is taking a lot of heat for supposedly staging a presidential teleconference with a bunch of soldiers now serving in Iraq. The group - half officers, half non-coms and an Iraqi soldier, is alleged to have been coached in what to say and what not to say, if you believe the mainstream media, which is calling the event stage managed, repeated the claim it was scripted.

While the WH deserves a lot of heat for various things it’s done, this isn’t one of them.

The event wasn’t a scripted Q&A. The only thing that was pre-arranged was where to sit, and how to pass the microphone, and which person (by job) was probably best suited to answer what kind of question.

But don’t take my word for it.

Take this guy’s word for it. He was there.

He’s a blogger. He was sitting in the front row.

He thinks the MSM is on the other side, and trying to rip down the President and the troops morale, and turn Iraq into another Viet Nam. Again, his words, not mine.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say this is a Rove-ian trick - put a couple soldier-bloggers in that group, and when the media does it’s usual thing, let the bloggers do theirs, and discredit the media. If we find that two or three of the eight or soldiers are bloggers, it’s probably safe to presume something is up - though it may have been the ground commander doing the scheming, rather than the WH. Since Zawahiri’s letter to Zarqawi was very clear, that Al Qaida’s war in Iraq is being fought in the theater or public opinion, we should call military actions to use the truth to discredit our pro-insurgent pro-terrorist MSM by the proper, military nomenclature: “preparing the battlefield.”

The MSM isn’t dead. But it is going to be walking around with two black eyes and a limp for a long time if it doesn’t start doing some basic truth telling.