What good does a free press do, when you can't trust what they report? We live in a time when digital technololgy can fake almost anything, so it becomes more critical all the time to know the sources, their biases and reliability. When it comes to the war in Iraq, we don't know what we can trust coming from Arab sources, because they don't seem to have any sense of truth as Westerners understand the concept.

Of course, Westerners have their own problems with the concept in the world of Postmodernism. It seems sometimes that we have two enemies to conquer, the first of which is our own major media. The histrionics at the New York Times over the revelations about a reporter making up stories, but not the slightest embarrassment over the misreports and denunciations regarding the "looting" of the Iraqi National Museum, illustrate the point. As someone said, ""It ain't so much the things you don't know that get you in trouble. It's the things you know that just ain't so." (That quote, in slightly varying form is attributed to Frank Hubbard, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain and probably a lot of others on the internet. Perhaps a better one for understanding the rage against George W. Bush, is "Truth is too simple for us; we do not like those who unmask our illusions." Ralph Waldo Emerson.) I can only hope that Americans still have enough common sense to question the authority of those who keep telling us to question authority.