WATB = Whiny Ass Titty Babies, aka the GOP.

In the continuing game of trying to blame anyone but themselves, the administration was working overtime this week to pin it's failure in Iraq on the media. The GOP talking point was that the media has selectively picked only the "bad" stories to report.

Of course this is nonsense on many levels, and completely reminiscent of administration strategy during the Vietnam war as we were losing that one too. But Atrios picks up a quote today from (I think) Peter Daou, who has reported from Iraq on numerous occasions:

Oh, yes. Absolutely. And, I mean, our own -- you know, our own editors back in New York are asking us the same things.

They read the same comments. You know, are there positive stories? Can't you find them?

You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.

Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked.

I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country. Reconstruction funds have been diverted to cover away from reconstruction to -- they've been diverted to security.

Soldiers, their lives are occupied most of the time with security issues. Iraqi civilians' lives are taken up most of the time with security issues.

So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here?

Aside from all the other arguments of how the GOP talking point is bull, this one highlights the catch-22 nature of the problem. Anything the U.S. touches in the region turns to absolute do-do.

But I also had another thought on this issue.

During the Vietnam war, Dan Rather virtually lived in my living room each night reporting from the front lines of the Vietnam war. There were no embeds and the war came to you in living, or dying, color. As a result of the belief that the media lost Vietnam for us all, the Pentagon embarked on it's program of embedding journalists and taking a high level of control over the media reports from any war. Since then, images have been limited and highly censored. We've also endured the bought-and-paid-for "journalistic" reports with the goal of putting lipstick on any pig.

To me, this really begs the question? Given the amount of control of the media by the Pentagon, who really bears the responsibility for reporting on the war? Can the same tired argument be used to write off the misdeeds of Iraq that conservatives used in Vietnam, given the level of control by the government of the media?

Of course, no matter how logical, they'll find a way to not take responsibility.

But still, I wonder .....