And I thought Ignatius had some sense.

Not after this piece in which he compares Bush to LBJ during Vietnam. This kind of pop psychological analysis is one of the worst sins media pundits commit. It tells you more about the one doing it than the one being analyzed. To suggest that "Bush works hard to disguise it, but one senses the same inner conflict that afflicted Johnson as Vietnam began to go bad," is pretty arrogant. As does the claim that he is "losing the ability to communicate effectively about the issue that matters most to him."

All this illustrates is that Ignatius doesn't know Bush very well. It also partakes of that "Who me?" attitude of journalists when they're accused of stacking the deck to influence public opinion, as if they had nothing to do with the relentless negative coverage of the war that pervades the media. Maybe it's their liberal educations or the fact that they only hang out with others like themselves, but for whatever reason our reporters have accepted moral equivalence and the counter-culture myths of the 60s and 70s as reality. Their training seems to teach them that nobody in government ever tells the truth and that American soldiers really are those thugs portrayed by John Kerry three decades ago. They react to honest patriotism, national pride and cheering for the good guys like Superman avoids kryptonite. Then they spin these scenarios and pass them off as analysis. They never wonder what happened to the old optimism and confidence that America once had, because they never believed it. They thought it was just a mask for our real corruption, capitalism.