No, I'm not happy.

Villainous Company (If you can get past the image at the top):

I am disgusted beyond measure. And for once, speechless. In their cynical pandering to a craven and ill-informed electorate, our trigger-happy Congress has once more fired off a shot that will indeed be heard round the world.

Read the David Ignatius piece in today's Washington Post along with this editorial. What I like about the editorial is that it doesn't follow the normal pattern of the media of burdening the president with every failure by other in the government. In this case, the fault belongs to the Democrats, the Republicans in Congress and the American public.

This whole episode might have been a clever feint by the Democrats to cause the Republicans fall on their faces, but I don't credit them with that much intelligence. The Republicans prevented the issue from becoming critical in this year's elections, but they were no statesmen.

In some ways, I tend to think that moderate Arabs have helped create this distrust by the American public, when they mostly kept silent throughout the Cartoon Rage and other outrages by the Arab street. They didn't have to approve of the cartoons, but they could have expressed their sense of insult without lending the support of silence to the rioters. It should be hoped that they can be persuaded to view this sorry affair with the same detachment that they have toward their own fellow Arabs' excesses. The Administration now has to reassure our friends in the Muslim world and convince them that we know not what we do.

That being said, I think that our media has so corrupted the public mind about Bush and the Iraq War that they bear a large part of the blame, as well. This morning I listened to an hour of Washington Journal on C-SPAN and was shocked by the amount of disinformation being parroted by callers about the war, the UAE and the Bush administration in general. What's going on is probably no worse than the worst days of yellow journalism, but the difference is that modern media folk are supposed to be educated and ethical and reporting news without editorializing.

I guess we all need to add 15 points to any poll results about the administration. That was the estimate by a senior reporter for Newsweek that the liberal bias adds to the Democrat candidates votes in a typical presidential election. The campaign hasn't ended; it just continues without the Dems' nominee being named.