{"id":180,"date":"2007-09-03T09:05:58","date_gmt":"2007-09-03T13:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/2007\/09\/03\/damned-if-you-do\/"},"modified":"2007-09-03T09:05:58","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T13:05:58","slug":"damned-if-you-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/damned-if-you-do","title":{"rendered":"Damned if you do…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bush.jpg\"<\/a>In a classic example of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” the Left has wasted no time criticizing President Bush’s surprise stop in Iraq today enroute to a summit in Australia, the third such visit he has made in four years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The anchors on CNN’s American Morning<\/em> this morning, John Roberts and Kiran Chetry,\u00a0said the president “by-passed the politically paralyzed Bahgdad,” choosing rather to land “out in the middle of nowhere well west of Baghdad in Al-Anbar province.” MSNBC<\/a> says the president is “using the war zone as a backdrop to argue his case that the buildup of U.S. troops is helping stabilizing the country.” This story is just breaking so you can be certain that as the media machine heats up throughout the day today the criticisms will mount.<\/p>\n

The Left understands this political reality: whenever a president of either party does something as daring as entering a war zone it increases his political capital. CNN and MSNBC are taking early and preemptive strikes to head off as much of that political capital as possible by suggesting that the president wasn’t bold enough to actually land in Baghdad and that in any event the whole thing is just a photo-op at tax payer expense.<\/p>\n

So why land in Al-Anbar province and not Baghdad? Al-Anbar province may be, according to CNN “out in the middle of nowhere,” but it is anything but a safe-zone as CNN is implying. Until the troop surge began a few months back, Al-Anbar province was experiencing the highest rate of U.S. and coalition casualities and was a significant training ground for Al-Qaeda. Since the troop surge,\u00a0violence is way down\u00a0in Al-Anbar province and Al-Qadea has been routed. Why should the president not choose to visit the troops there to personally thank them for their service? And why should the media fault the president for doing so? Because such a high-profile visit calls attention to the truth that things are improving in Iraq, something the mainstream media does not have the will to admit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a classic example of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” the Left has wasted no time criticizing President Bush’s surprise stop in Iraq today enroute to a summit in Australia, the third such visit he has made … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}