Heaven Forbid Journalists Report Facts

Barrett Brown wrote a lengthy and hilarious post over at Vanity Fair about conservative reaction to Michael Hastings’ blockbuster Rolling Stone piece that brought down McChrystal. Couched in an attack on National Review (too easy!), it’s a rather damning indictment of the media in general. To wit:

Unlike many of this country’s most respected commentators, Hastings did not spend the better part of a decade repeating conventional wisdom about our allegedly unprecedented success in two wars that have already proven to be abject failures, and thus he has no reason to simply take the word of some or another confused presidential administration that everything is under control, or will be after some additional expenditure of blood and treasure.

Another taste, for color:

I myself am a subscriber [of National Review] and find myself constantly distracted by the ads, many of which are written to look like articles and which routinely conjure up dubious global financial entities in order to convince the publication’s readers to buy coins in exchange for some unspecified number of payments in order that they might also receive a free safe. Advertisers know their audience, naturally.

Read the whole thing.

More Important Considerations Than Personnel

What the hell were McChrystal and co. thinking? I don’t know. (Yes I do: they were drunk.) But this much I know to be true: their complaints about the civilian leadership are a hell of a lot less important than the actual on-the-ground success of their strategy in Afghanistan. Matt Yglesias makes the necessary point:

Back in the real world it seems obvious to me that the Obama administration’s actual McChrystal-related problem is simply that the situation in Afghanistan is deeply problematic. The hoped-for improvements in governance and the credibility of Hamid Karzai’s regime have not emerged. The population in much of the country remains pro-Taliban, anti-Karzai, and anti-ISAF. This is a big problem. And the portrait that emerges in the Rolling Stone article is of a military command that knows it’s not really making progress but doesn’t see the door open to any alternative policies. It’s a huge problem—much bigger than the question of what to do or not about one general.

What you have to remember here is that McChrystal is the architect of the bold and controversial Af-Pak strategy announced last December. The outcome of the months-long “strategic review” was buy-in to his vision. And that vision is failing. However, I don’t think that if McChrystal does leave, as is looking increasingly likely, this affair will occasion any change in strategy — the basic underpinnings of the current strategy are time and patience, after all. There’s still a year to go until the July 2011 deadline, nearly six months until the December review. Obama cannot be seen as capricious in this. But it does seem clear that McChrystal, brilliant strategist though he may be, is not the man for the job.