The United States of America vs. the MSM and Hollywood

 
Gateway Pundit has the latest numbers:

Violence in Iraq is down by 50%.
Civilian casualties in Iraq are down by 60%.
Baghdad casualties are down by 75%.
Basra violence is down by 90%.
Terrorist attacks in Iraq are down by 80%.

Even AFP is running positive stories on life in Iraq, so you'd think our mainstream media would've started to get the picture. But let's not hurry them.

"Even two or three months ago we would have been afraid to come here at night," said 20-year-old Hussein Salah, an off-duty soldier, slurping a milkshake with his wife, Shihad, at the Mishmesha (apricot) juice bar in Baghdad's relatively safe Karrada suburb.

"Now we sometimes sit outside here till one or two in the morning. It is quite safe. The security situation is vastly improved," said Salah, the orange light from a nearby flashing palm alternatively brightening and dimming his clean-shaven face.

Of course, Hollywood is sticking with their bankruptcy-inducing meme: the U.S. military is a bunch of bloodthirsthy, homicidal rapists. Michael Medved's review of Re****ed (you see, I've redacted its name) is short and to the point:

It could be the worst movie I've ever seen ... "[T]he out and out worst, most disgusting, most hateful, most incompetent, most revolting, most loathsome, most reprehensible cinematic work I have ever encountered. ... It portrays the members of our Marine Corps in the most disgusting way imaginable... This film is an atrocity. It is zero stars... I honestly was close to vomiting when I saw the film... It is a slander on the United States of America... Everyone associated with this film ought to be ashamed... Will it inspire future terrorists? Of course it will!

Back in the real world, TigerHawk compares 1864 and 2008:

In 1864 Americans were fed up with the Civil War, in which there were days on which more soldiers were killed than have died in four years of the Iraq war. "Mr. Lincoln is already beaten," wrote Horace Greeley, perhaps the leading journalist. And three months before the election Republican leaders told president Lincoln that he had no hope of reelection. As Peter Wallison of AEI recently recalled, the Democratic platform denounced "four years of failure" in the war effort and Gen. George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate opposing Lincoln recommended making peace on Southern terms.

But on September 1 the news reached Washington that Atlanta had fallen to the Union army, and on election day it appeared as if the North was on the way to victory. Lincoln was decisively reelected. And, according to historian Allan Nevins, "The damage done to the Democratic Party by the platform could not be undone. Its … stigmatization of the heroic war effort as worthless gave the Northern millions an image of the Democratic Party they could never forget….and would cost the party votes for a generation."

Remember Senator Harry Reid's infamous proclamation declaring that "the war is lost"?

My prediction is that after a GOP rout in 2008, Mr. Reid will no longer have a job as Senate Majority Leader.

Cartoon: Ramirez. A Texas-sized tip o' the hat to Larwyn