There’s a good news article in the SF Chronicle today, and one that also has a one interesting point and one missing point.  First, the good news:  A local Marine battalion just returned home yesterday, safe and sound, from its fifth tour of duty:

Number five was relatively easy.

The Marine battalion that has been to Iraq more often than any other returned home this week, and unlike previous trips to that combat zone, not a single leatherneck was lost.

I am delighted, and can’t think of any happier news to accompany a battalion’s return.  Congratulations go to each man (and woman?) in that battalion.  Hurrah!

The article has two more interesting aspects that I wanted to bring to your attention.  First, while the Code Pinkers weep nightly for the babies the evil Bush administration is sending to Iraq, the babies have different ideas.  They were bored:

“It was a pretty smooth tour,” said Maj. Kevin Norton, second-in-command of 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment. “I think a lot of these Marines would rather have gone to Afghanistan.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — for all their bleeding hearts, Lefties lack empathy.  They are incapable of understanding that, while they run from any fight that doesn’t have a conservative American as an opponent (’cause they know the latter won’t hurt them), there are men and women who enjoy the challenge of a real fight, against a real opponent.  I’m not of those people but, by God!, I am so grateful that we have in this country people who are willing to do the tough fighting so that I don’t have to.

The other interesting thing in the article is the magical quality it imparts to the peace the Marines found on this, their last tour:

On this seven-month tour, there were no fatalities and only a handful of wounded. One Marine was injured badly enough to be sent back to the United States early.

This was made possible by a nearly total reversal of the level of violence in Anbar province, which for a time could not be mentioned in a story without the term “restive” in front of it. But the tribes of Anbar changed their way of thinking in the last year or so, and decided to side with the Americans and fight the foreign jihadists who had brought fear, intimidation and death by beheading to both the Americans and the local Iraqis.

Known as the “Awakening” movement, the decision by the Sunnis of Anbar, aided by money from the Americans, has meant a precipitous drop in violence in that region, which is west of Baghdad and stretches to the Syrian border. It includes the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, once two of the most dangerous places on Earth.

This is the new liberal line, and comes directly from the Biden playbook:  the Surge had nothing to do with the dramatic decrease in violence in Iraq.  It was just an mad moment of enlightenment amongst the tribes.  Those people just “changed their way of thinking.”  The most the author of the story will admit to is the fact that substantial cash infusions made a difference.  I think it was substantial Marine infusions that made the difference, but what do I know — I don’t write for the MSM.

The LA Times has mounted a spirited defense against the ever increasing volume of reader complaints the Times is getting about its loving coverage of Obama, especially when contrasted with the fact that its McCain coverage is minimal and fairly hostile.  Here’s the key part of its defense:

[I]t’s the string of Page 1 stories and photos that has brought the most recent protests: On Sunday, July 20, the Campaign ’08 banner was over a story about the Iraqi prime minister’s endorsement of Obama’s plan for withdrawing U.S. troops; on Monday the article was about the political furor triggered by that withdrawal plan. On Tuesday the front-page story was “Obama’s views resonate in Iraq.” (That was the headline in print; headlines on the online versions are often different.) Each story included an above-the-fold photograph. There were front-page stories, too, last week, on July 15 (“Obama re-admonishes blacks“), 16 (“Obama stands by his plan to end war“), and 17 (a profile of Obama and his father headlined “So alike and yet so different”).

[snip]

The news itself dictates the amount of coverage, editors point out. Times reporters are on the trail with both McCain and Obama. In recent days, coverage of McCain has included two front-page pieces (“Housing crisis is a test for McCain” on July 19 and “McCain takes a risk on Social Security,” July 14), several brief stories as well as two longer ones inside the main section (“McCain wins some respect,” about his address before the NAACP convention, Page A14 on July 17; “McCain’s turn before La Raza in San Diego,” Page A11, July 15).

Aaron Zitner, who edits campaign coverage from The Times’ Washington bureau, summarizes the events that made for more news about Obama’s overseas trip: “First,” Zitner wrote in an e-mail, “the Iraqi government decided to announce during Obama’s trip that it agreed, more or less, with his timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals. This was significant news, because it suggested that the Iraqi government is not on the same page with President Bush on this important issue — and the Bush administration is actively negotiating with the Iraqis just now over the role of U.S. forces there.

“Second, the Iraqi government turned Obama’s trip into a three-day news event. The Iraqis said that they agreed with Obama’s timeline for troop withdrawals, then the next day suggested that they disagreed with him, and then seemed to agree with him again on the third day. This kept Obama’s visit in the news.

“Finally, Obama’s reception in the Mideast was significant. At home, his opponents are trying to portray him as naive on foreign policy, particularly in his proposals to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months and to sit down at the table with Iran. The fact that Iraqi leaders agreed with him on the first point, and that Israeli leaders accepted his views on Iran, made for substantive news stories.”

Earlier in the month, readers who protested the story of McCain’s first marriage received a note from National Editor Scott Kraft: “The piece on John McCain’s first marriage was one of a number of stories we have done — and will continue to do — on the two candidates for president. In those pieces, we are looking at every aspect of the candidates’ lives. We are looking at what they said about their past and what others say about their past.

“This was a story that looked at that period in McCain’s life when his marriage broke up, he met his current wife and when his personal relationship soured with the Reagans, among others. We also looked at the discrepancy between what the candidate said in his autobiography and what he said in court documents that he signed. I think voters themselves can determine whether such discrepancies are relevant or irrelevant. But they can’t make those decisions without all the facts. McCain and Obama have put themselves up for the highest elected office in the land. We think their background is not only fair game — it’s something every thinking voter would want to know more about.”

A few comments about the above defense — and I’ll note right up front that, while I’ve generally followed the media coverage of the two candidates, I haven’t been tracking the LA Times at all. Nevertheless, its pretty clear from the defense itself that the Times‘ coverage is completely consistent with that coming from the rest of the American media.

What immediately leaps out of the above series of excuses is the nature of the stories about the two candidate: The personal story about Obama is about his yearning for his father; the personal story about McCain is about how he screwed his first wife. The McCain headlines are consistent with that theme.  Without reading the articles themselves, the headlines tell a story of McCain’s trial’s and tribulations — the risks he’s running and the head-barely-above-water status of his campaign.  On their face, an objective observer can see that they’re less than adulatory.

The Obama headlines strike a very different tone.  (Again, I’m just riffing off the defense, and am reading their underlines, not their underlying stories.)  These headlines are about leadership.  They hit upon Obama’s firm stance on the war (no indication in the headline that his position was wrong and his defense is now duplicitous), about his leadership in the black community, and about the way Iraqis love his viewpoint.

It’s this last that’s especially interesting.  As you notice, the Times goes on and on in defense of its coverage by pointing out what a great reception Obama’s gotten in Iraq and how his brilliance is proven by the fact that Maliki currently concurs with Obama’s position du jour.

The problem with this excuse for prObama coverage is that we’ve got nothing against which to compare it.  Unlike Obama, who has reached all his pre-July 20 positions regarding Iraq in a perfect vacuum of factual ignorance, John McCain has made repeated trips to Iraq — and these trips got scant coverage from the MSM, including the Times.

At the time McCain went to Iraq, he advocated the Surge — as did high and low level Iraqis, who desperately needed America there to restore order and prevent a blood bath. Indeed, let me give McCain’s own version of his principled stand, taken from his speech today in Denver:

We both knew the politically safe choice was to support some form of retreat. All the polls said the “surge” was unpopular. Many pundits, experts and policymakers opposed it and advocated withdrawing our troops and accepting the consequences. I chose to support the new counterinsurgency strategy backed by additional troops — which I had advocated since 2003, after my first trip to Iraq. Many observers said my position would end my hopes of becoming president. I said I would rather lose a campaign than see America lose a war. My choice was not smart politics. It didn’t test well in focus groups. It ignored all the polls. It also didn’t matter. The country I love had one final chance to succeed in Iraq. The new strategy was it. So I supported it. Today, the effects of the new strategy are obvious. The surge has succeeded, and we are, at long last, finally winning this war.

That is historically accurate.  And here’s McCain’s equally accurate summation of Obama’s Iraq position:

Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn’t just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better.

In other words, what the LA Times doesn’t acknowledge as it tries to explain why Obama gets all the Iraq love this July is that the only reason the ObaMessiah can look good right now is because John McCain was right over and over again, not in July 2008, but in 2003 and 2004 and 2005 and 2006 and 2007.  It was McCain’s drive and vision that helped create the scenario that now enables Obama to feel the media’s unending love.

So, while it’s news today that Obama is well-received, the Times must be faulted — vigorously and loudly — for missing all of yesterday’s news about McCain’s fact-finding, vision, and principled stand.  Even more importantly, the media must be faulted for ignoring the fact that, while the Iraqi leadership might, for pragmatic reasons agree with Obama today, the history it shoved to the back and bottom of its papers shows that for years, not just for a week or two, the Iraqi people were in complete accord with McCain’s defense of their lives and safety.

Iraq aside, there’s also no excuse for the press’s gaga response to Obama’s European junket — and, significantly, the LA Times doesn’t even try to defend it.  Last I saw, Obama was the putative Democratic candidate for an American presidential election.  The rock star treatment accorded him in Europe, an agglomeration of states that does not have America’s interests at heart, did not give me any greater sense of his leadership abilities than I had before.  And the fact that the media uncritically reported every step and breath he took, without bothering to point out errors or inconsistencies again indicates that the Times‘ editorial team, whatever else you can say about it, is singularly lacking in insight.  And when you think about it, that makes this editorial group the perfect match for the approval-craving narcissist in chief of the Democratic party.

UPDATE:  Laer has more about the LA Times delicate sensibilities when it comes to determining what’s newsworthy about Democrats.

In light of the Surge’s manifest success, John Hawkins, of Right Wing News, has written a column that assembles many of the Democratic gloom and doom predictions about the Surge when it was first proposed.  Makes for interesting reading in that it exposes the profound ignorance and ideological blindness coming from the Left.

Michael Yon, who appropriately boasts that he is probably the most experienced reporter in Iraq, reminds us that Congress must stop obsessing about the past in Iraq and must approach Iraq as a winnable situation. He begins by detailing the enormous strides — both practical and “hearts and mind” stuff — that Americans have accomplished in Iraq:

It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about “GoArmy.com.”

The problem as he sees it (and I agree, as I’ve said before), isn’t what’s on the ground in Iraq, it’s what’s going on in Congress. There, the Democrats are determined to destroy George Bush, even if it means taking the whole US down with him, and the Republicans are desperate to pander to anyone with a shrill complaint. The result, of course, is that they’re legislating as if it’s 2005, not 2008:

Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a soldier’s money. The shoeless heroes who froze at Valley Forge were paid, and when their pay did not come they threatened to leave – and some did. Soldiers have families and will not fight for a nation that allows their families to starve. But to say that the tribes who fight with us are “rented” is perhaps as vile a slander as to say that George Washington’s men would have left him if the British offered a better deal.

Equally misguided were some senators’ attempts to use Gen. Petraeus’s statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers’ achievements as “merely” military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni “awakening” was not primarily a military event any more than it was “bribery.” It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big “kinetic” military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can’t do it from inside a jet or a tank.

As for me, I’ve sent this article to my Senators and my Representative. They’re all radical Democrats, so I doubt it will change their rigid, hate-filled little minds one bit, but it can’t hurt and there’s a smidgen of a chance that it might open their minds to the facts on the ground.

By the way, if you want a sense of how far the “lose at any cost” Left is willing to go, check out this American Thinker post about the attacks on General Petraeus for wearing tacky medals.  And Representative Jackie Speier, armed with an almost complete absence of useful information, didn’t even wait until her new seat was warmed up to leap into the lunatic anti-War sphere.  It must be interesting living in a factual vacuum.  I wonder if, eventually, your head explodes.