For what it's worth

Walter Russell Mead:

Today is one of those days in which we are particularly grateful that George W. Bush is no longer the president of the United States.

The news from Afghanistan is grim. With the latest round of deaths, we pass a milestone: 2,000 US combatants have died in what is now the longest war in American history. The milestone has been reached just as the surge in troops has come to an end without achieving the goals of pacifying the country or even launching peace talks with the Taliban. Our Afghan “allies” remain as corrupt and ineffectual as ever, with the added wrinkle that the most dangerous place in Afghanistan for US troops these days seems to be the neighborhood of US-armed and trained Afghan forces, who are shooting and blowing up their nominal allies faster than the Taliban can do it.

This is all bad news and very disturbing, but there is a crumb of comfort to be had. Because these failures happened on President Obama’s watch, the mainstream press isn’t particularly interested in relentless, non-stop scrutiny of the unpleasant news. If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.

There would be no end to the woes and the recriminations. There would be the most moving and eloquent examples of hand wringing in the New York Review of Books, elegantly demonstrating that the cretinous assumptions and moral failings that led Bush into his failed Afghan policy weren’t his alone, but reflected broader, deeper failings in America itself. One is almost sorry for the sake of the authors of these diatribes that Bush is gone; the failure of our Afghan strategy is so sweeping, so unavoidable, that it would be the best possible backdrop against which to paint a stirring portrait of a failed president misleading a flawed people. What works of polemical literature have been lost, what inspired jeremiads will never be penned, what scalding portraits of America’s inherent flaws will never see the light of day because W left the White House too soon.

Allahpundit, at Hot Air:

I think Joel Pollak is onto something in arguing that the media’s taken to treating Romney as the de facto incumbent, although I can’t decide if that’s something they’re doing consciously or by instinct. My hunch is that, for some of them, it’s less a deliberate strategy to put Romney on the defensive than it is a habit they’re falling into because they’re itching to return to adversarial/watchdog duty. Their partisan leanings have made that too difficult for four years, but now they’ve got a person on the other side who’s close to winning the presidency to whom they can speak “truth.” So President Romney’s statement the morning after the embassy attack is a Very Big Deal with Very Serious Implications for the race, but Obama blowing town to raise some money in Vegas later that night is “curious” or whatever. Rest assured, if Romney wins, Afghanistan will once again be a matter of pressing national interest subject to “grim milestone” watches on the news rather than the very minor foreign-policy subplot that it’s become. In fact, I doubt most members of the media would deny that. One thing I’ve noticed as media watchdogging has exploded online is that they’re much more open about admitting which way the press, as a whole, leans. There are too many examples of it to deny it, so why bother denying it? They’ll cop to it in the aggregate, so long as their own personal integrity isn’t questioned. Now if only they’d do something about it.

Perhaps they are, somewhat belatedly.