But it's important to remember that from the outset, the media took it as their sworn duty to keep Americans from getting too riled up about 9/11. I wrote a column about it back in March of 2002. Back then the news networks especially saw it as imperative that we not let our outrage get out of hand. I can understand the sentiment, but it's worth noting that such sentiments vanished entirely during hurricane Katrina. After 9/11, the press withheld objectively accurate and factual images from the public, lest the rubes get too riled up. After Katrina, the press endlessly recycled inaccurate and exaggerated information in order to keep everyone upset. The difference speaks volumes.
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Suffice it to say, I think liberals are paying penance for the fact they mostly sided with conservatives on the Iraq war, or at least didn't do much to stop it. Now they feel like they must prove their progressive bona fides, and in other ways atone for the errors of their ways, particularly now that the left has the upper-hand politically. So they bow and scrape to the netroots, they're terrified of seeming like a "wanker" and they don't worry that irrational Bush hatred will ever count against them professionally.
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This might sound unfair, but if George Bush had been a better president, John Edwards would never have dreamed of calling the war on terror nothing but a bumper sticker. As it stands right now, if any Democratic candidate other than Joe Biden or maybe Hillary Clinton (!) gets elected we will bug out of Iraq so precipitously it will be indistinguishable from abject defeat in the eyes of the world. And under any of them, the war on terror will become a glorified Elliot Spitzer style legal campaign. That is not a sign that President Bush has adequately led the country or prepared it for the struggles ahead.
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