Choice Comments On The Iraqi Election

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This is a gift that keeps on giving. Mark Steyn offers his usual wit-filled and incisive commentary here. An excerpt:

You might not have gained [the impression that things are going well in Iraq] from watching CNN or reading the Los Angeles Times. The Western press are all holed up in the same part of Baghdad, and the insurgents very conveniently set off bombs visible from their hotel windows in perfect synchronization with the U.S. TV news cycle. But, if they could look beyond the plumes of smoke, they'd see that Iraq's going to be better than OK, that it will be the economic powerhouse of the region, and that the various small nods toward democracy going on in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere suggest that the Arab world has figured out what the foreign policy ''realists'' haven't: that the trend is in the Bush direction. When Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warned that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would ''destabilize'' the entire region, he was right. That's why it was such a great idea.

Glenn Reynolds tells "Why The Press Got It Wrong" and how the blogosphere is leaping ahead of the old news media in getting good information out.

Thomas Sowell skewers John Kerry for his Meet The Press comments. Hat tip to Rocket Man at Power Line, who, like me, wishes he'd said that. Excerpt:

Senator Kerry has a long record as a defeatist and obstructionist. Back in 1971, he said, "we cannot fight communism all over the world" -- adding in the same arrogant tone he uses today, "I think we should have learned that lesson by now."

Ronald Reagan never learned that lesson -- and hundreds of millions of human beings are free of communist tyranny today as a result. But during all the years when President Reagan was building up our military forces and our intelligence agencies, Senator Kerry was consistently voting against the appropriations required to do so. . . .

[Kerry and other self-appointed foreign policy elites] imagined themselves to be so much wiser than other people that condescension was only natural, as they brushed aside any other viewpoint with such dismissive words as "cowboy" or even "stupid." The fact that events proved the defeatist elitists dead wrong in the Cold War -- and now again in the Iraqi elections -- has not yet broken through their smugness.

Probably nothing ever will. But that does not mean that the rest of us need to keep taking their high opinion of themselves seriously.

Indeed.