It seems the media thinks it’s fine to flush trillions of dollars down the toilet and get hundreds of thousands of people killed in a spectacularly doomed occupation, so long as the brutality is relatively easy to ignore.

It’s not immediately obvious what explains a bias that is this extreme and widespread. Probably a number of factors are to blame. There is typical imperial chauvinism — the belief in American exceptionalism not only in thinking it is best country on Earth, but also that it has the right and ability to meddle in other countries’ affairs whenever it wants.

Then there is the fact that a large fraction of purportedly “neutral” reporters have decided to brand themselves as hysterically pro-Troop — a tendency that got much stronger after 9/11. Every Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, you see a lot of normally buttoned-down reporters posting maudlin Twitter threads or Facebook posts appreciating American soldiers for their Heroic Sacrifice. (A recurring joke in lefty Twitter is baiting these folks into retweeting pictures of non-soldiers — like Chapo Trap House co-host Felix Biederman — or war criminals.) Some reporters have gotten so deep into instinctive troop worship that they can question basic principles of democracy like civilian control of the military, seemingly without even noticing.