I wish I had the time and inclination to feed into this board details about all the Iraqi cities that have no violence (go ahead. List all the violent Iraqi cities in the news. How many do you come up with? Five? A dozen? Try it. What the hell is going on in the rest of Iraq?), Interviews with Iraqis that are spiked by the media, in favor of interviews with radicals. The stories from military people actually on the front line. The details of successful military actions across that country.

None of this is reaching America, unless people go out and literally scratch it up. Websites. Home-town papers. Foreign news sources.

Many of the media people feeding information into America want this war to be lost.

I don't know how much clearer I can put that.

Every story that promotes defeat is told. Stories that do not are not. Stories that make our military look effective are ignored. Stories that make our military look harried, or cruel, are emphasized.

How a story is told is twisted. I could give examples by the dozens.

Full-bore Vietnam self-destruct. I can't fight it here, or anywhere else. There's only one of me, and it would be a full-time job.

Just one example:

From a briefing by Rumsfeld:

To get a sense of the stark contrast between the good that coalition forces are doing in Iraq and the tactics that the enemy has used consistently, if one thinks back, they used hospitals, they used mosques, they used schools as weapons locations and fortresses to fight from throughout the time of the invasion. The photo of terrorists using a mosque in Najaf as a base for attacks against our forces is an example of what we're finding. There have been additional attacks taken from mosques in Fallujah, and I believe there have been embedded reporters who have been able to -- as well as combat camera -- able to make some of that available to the American people.

There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to headline saying that Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques. That would be one way to present the information.

Another might be to say: Mosques Targeted in Fallujah. That was the Los Angeles Times headline this morning.

Multiply this kind of thing by hundreds. Is it any wonder surveys are turning out the way they are?

Newspapers write about the ceasefire being "shattered" by Marine attacks, as though they simply decided for no particular reason to attack right then, when in fact the ceasefire has been routinely violated by the insurgents.

BTW, have you ever noticed how Middle East truces are always "shattered" by the Israeli military responses, never by Palestinian bombings?

Okay, I'm rambling now. But this is really frustrating.