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Michelle: The media’s guilty of a double standard on Obama’s Afghanistan surge

posted at 3:51 pm on February 19, 2009 by Allahpundit
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Eh, I don’t know. There is a double standard at work here, but it has less to do with who’s in office than with the fact that the left’s painted itself into a corner by using Afghanistan as a talking point against Iraq for the past six years. Afghanistan’s the “good war” to which we should be devoting our resources, the argument goes, not to the neocon rodeo in Mesopotamia. Disparities in public support for the two missions over the last four years have backed that position up. That being so, what can the media do now when The One says he’s ready to send 17,000 troops to Kabul except swallow hard?

Rest assured, he will eventually face pushback from the left for this — the first stirrings are already occurring — but they’re not going to ruin the honeymoon a month into his term. A more useful discussion for the Foxies than media bias would be why, oh why, with Hopenchange fever supposedly sweeping the globe, Europe refuses to kick in a few extra troops to win the war even liberals think (or so they say) needs to be won. Thanks to Legal Insurrection for that link.

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Let’s hope Code Pink pickets the Whitehouse.

WASHINGTON — CODEPINK Women for Peace is heartbroken and discouraged by President Obama’s decision to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, a screeching halt to his rhetoric for change and moving our country in a new direction.

CODEPINK women call on Obama and his administration to reject a proven-false military solution, and call for a surge in diplomacy and humanitarian aid and an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“It makes no sense to appoint Richard Holbrooke to find a way out of the Afghan quagmire while sending 17,000 more troops,” said Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK co-founder. “You can’t do diplomacy while widening the war. We must freeze the number of troops, engage in immediate diplomatic efforts — with Afghan women at the table — and then replace our military mission with a humanitarian, reconstruction mission. That would reflect the change the American people voted for.

mistersurefire on February 20, 2009 at 10:43 AM

AP, do you seriously think the left would not have turned against US operations in Afghanistan, had we not tackled the second front in Iraq? They were already starting to before 2001 even drew to a close. Their “opposition” to our efforts in Iraq never had anything to do with Iraq per se; they simply seized on it as the opportunity they’d been searching for since 9/11 itself, as a wedge to try to turn the public against Bush.

Cylor on February 20, 2009 at 11:31 AM

Republicans = big national debt and spending
Republicans = un-just wars and agression
Republicans = racism