Absolutely, Positively, Not To Be Trusted

When Ann Coulter's book Treason came out last year (a good read, BTW), I thought the title was just a bit over the top. No more. Hugh Hewitt has a nice bit of rhetoric about the complete inability of the Democrats and the MSM to take the defense of this country seriously (is that the problem, or is it that they take the defeat of this country all too seriously?):

This is the core problem: A horrific disfigurement of religious belief into a killing frenzy. It was the motivation behind 9/11, Bali, Madrid, and Beslan, and it is the motivation behind the terror is Iraq today. The only solution --the only solution-- is the creation of societies committed to religious pluralism. It takes a long, long time for such societies to develop, but a beginning has been made in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan. The president's speech was an argument about why perseverance is not only necessary but in fact indispensable to survival of the West. The cut-and-run caucus led by Ted and MoveOn and Howard et al simply refuses to look the evil in its face and deal with it. Their dodge is to claim that our troops' presence is the cause of the evil. This laughable argument is at its heart a suicide note. When Howard Dean declares that the president's speech is about "the darkness of divisiveness, attempting to garner support for his failed policies by pandering to fear," it signals the fundamental irresponsibility of the party he leads. Quite simply, the Democratic Party cannot be trusted with the national security because it absolutely refuses to recognize the peril of Islamist fanaticism.

The American public --at least a sizeable majority of the American public-- understands that threat, which is why the Dems have had their collective head handed to them in 2002 and 2004, and why the same result will occur in 2006. The reason the media's reputation has in fact fallen off of the floor to even lower depths is because of the refusal to treat the war as a war rather than a political battle. "Growing numbers of people question the news media's patriotism and fairness," Pew's most recent report concluded. "Perceptions of political bias also have risen over the past two years." The public understands we are in a war and wonders why the elite media doesn't seem to get that crucial fact.