Remember this this blast from the past that, uh, sounds a lot like a blast from even further in the past?
NORAH O’DONNELL: I asked her about the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that we have out today that essentially says only 2 in 10 Americans approve of the job that the president is doing on Iraq. And Mrs. Bush defended her husband vigorously. Take a listen.
LAURA BUSH: It is not encouraging coverage for sure. There’s no doubt about it. But I do know that there are a lot of good things that are happening that aren’t covered. And I think that the drum beat in the country from the media, from the only way people know what is happening unless they happened to have a loved one deployed there, is discouraging.
O’DONNELL: She says that she hopes that there is "more balanced coverage by the media," in her words. She also said "I understand why the polls are what they are" she says, "because of the coverage we see every day in Iraq."
Well, Media Matters was, as always, all over it. And what, precisely, did they sink their teeth into?
On the December 14 edition of MSNBC News Live, rather than challenging first lady Laura Bush's assertion that the media have failed to cover "a lot of good things that are happening" in Iraq, MSNBC chief Washington correspondent Norah O'Donnell prompted Laura Bush to elaborate on "some of those good things that people should know about." Beyond pointing out that "there are a lot of deaths every day," O'Donnell did not dispute Bush's assertion. In response, the first lady asserted that the media, for example, have not covered the "schools that are being built."
Yes. The "schools that are being built."
Er, about those schools...
Iraq's schools, long touted by American officials as a success story in a land short on successes, increasingly are being caught in the crossfire of the country's escalating civil war.
President Bush has routinely talked about the refurbishment and construction of schools as a neglected story of progress in Iraq. The U.S. Agency for International Development has spent about $100 million on Iraq's education system and cites the rehabilitation of 2,962 school buildings as a signal accomplishment.
But today, across the country, campuses are being shuttered, students and teachers driven from their classrooms and parents left to worry that a generation of traumatized children will go without education.
Teachers tell of students kidnapped on their way to school, mortar rounds landing on or near campuses and educators shot in front of children.
This month insurgents distributed pamphlets at campuses, some sealed inside an envelope with an AK-47 bullet.
Yeah, Baghdad's just like Philadelphia, alright.
But maybe they just picked the wrong city for comparison?
No credible current national school attendance statistics exist in Iraq, whose education system was once considered a model in the Arab world.
Ah, yes! That's it! Iraq's not like Philadelphia. It's like Houston.