Well, so much for the media war...

It's official: we've lost the war for control over the mainstream media. While we wanted a honest news service (after all, the best news for liberalism is truth), the right wing has beat us into subduing the largest source of public information in history. Case in point, the newest AP article claiming the Army Reserve is "broken:"

WASHINGTON - The Army Reserve, whose part-time soldiers serve in combat and support roles in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites), is so hampered by misguided Army policies and practices that it is "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force," the Reserve's most senior general says.

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, wrote in an internal memorandum to the Army's top uniformed officer that the Reserve has reached the point of being unable to fulfill its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and to regenerate its forces for future missions.

The Army Reserve has about 200,000 soldiers, nearly 52,000 of them on active duty for the war on terrorism, mainly in Iraq.

emphasis mine.

When the mainstream media can shamelessly call the military operation in Iraq a part of the "war on terrorism" (another right-wing creation), we have completely and utterly lost our fight for rational objectivity in the media. I don't need to explain that Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with our struggle against terrorism; any person who reads the newspaper and is subsequently aware of the Dulfer report, the 9/11 commission report, and the countless other pieces of evidence proving the nonexistence of a link between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq should realize that. But somehow our nation's mainstream media has gone along with the neocons' propaganda. Regardless, we'll continue to lose until we can restore any semblance of rational thought to the public conscience.