When the left can equate this:
Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
“He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”
To this:
President Bush is right to finally admit that violence in Iraq has reached a tipping point, and that the U.S. is not winning the war as he has claimed.
Or this:
Bush Accepts Iraq-Vietnam Comparison
Then you know either the left has a basic comprehension problem or they are trying to spin something which is not there.
Bush, who obviously has a better grasp of history then does Stephanopoulos can see the parallel between a battle which destroyed the enemy:
The Tet Offensive can be considered a crushing military defeat for the Communist forces, as neither the Viet Cong nor the North Vietnamese army achieved any of their tactical goals. Furthermore, the operational cost of the offensive was dangerously high, with the Viet Cong essentially crippled by the huge losses inflicted by South Vietnamese and other Allied forces.
And the leftist media blitz that began after the offensive which eventually forced our withdrawal from a war we were winning:
Although US public opinion polls continued to show a majority supporting involvement in the war, this support continued to deteriorate and the nation became increasingly polarized over the war. President Lyndon Johnson saw his popularity fall sharply after the Offensive, and he withdrew as a candidate for re-election in March of 1968. The Tet Offensive is frequently seen as an example of the value of propaganda, media influence and popular opinion in the pursuit of military objectives.
So be prepared for the spin on this one. The left will try to say, as they already are, that Bush is admitting defeat when nothing could be further from the truth. He recognizes that we won that battle, but the leftist propaganda machine inside the country spun it exactly the opposite. As they are doing now.
Tigerhawk puts it succinctly:
Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the President obviously knows more history than his interviewer. When President Bush “accepts” the analogy of the surge in violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, he is not “accepting” that Iraq is an unwinnable struggle against a noble enemy. He is saying that victory or defeat in Iraq will not be a function of the amount of violence that the enemy is able to do during any given period, but our will to keep fighting notwithstanding that violence. In that one regard, Iraq is dangerously similar to Vietnam, which fact the mainstream media would know if the typical editor read military history instead of the journalism pretending to be history that fills the bestseller lists.
The MSM is furthering the goals of our enemy, plain and simple. The goals were laid out by Al-Qaeda, when it came to our media, in a paper titled “Working Paper for a Media Invasion of America”. Mudville Gazette does a great job describing this recently translated paper:
Najd al-Rawi, the document’s author, begins by noting that although they’ve been successful in many ways, the jihaddists haven’t fully exploited the opportunities presented by the US media. Inspired by a video from bin Laden addressing the American people with subtitles in English, the author notes that “It seemed the Shayk wanted to send a clear message to his brother mujahadeen to pay more attention to this part of the mission.” He points out that videos from the “Shayks of jihad” are in great demand in the western media.
But it appears that our MSM does not need anymore help in this regard. They have been doing this kind of spinning for decades and they show no sign of slowing down. Hell, the NYT’s, that great bastion of anti-American sentiment can even see it:
The jihadists follow our politics much more closely than people realize. A friend at the Pentagon just sent me a post by the “Global Islamic Media Front” carried by the jihadist Web site Ana al-Muslim on Aug. 11. It begins: “The people of jihad need to carry out a media war that is parallel to the military war and exert all possible efforts to wage it successfully. This is because we can observe the effect that the media have on nations to make them either support or reject an issue.”
[…]It would be depressing to see the jihadists influence our politics with a Tet-like media/war frenzy.
And after this spinning of an interview with the President we can now see the “media war” has begun with a frenzy. Just take a look at this screenshot of the ABC News webpage tonight and tell me if the spinning has begun?
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