The MSM's take on Iraq's "failure"

Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author who regularly contributes to NewsMax.com. She has a column entitled Death Throes of the Mainstream Media, which lays the case out that the MSM is in total denial about facts, and perversely so. The column is here.

Check out this excerpt, so next time some latte-sipping tree-hugging liberal asks you "What are doing RIGHT in Iraq?" (aside from that pesky and trivial election-democracy-thingee), you'll have some facts:

Ray Reynolds (SFC Iowa Army National Guard, 234th Signal Battalion) wrote a letter home as he headed to Baghdad for the final weeks of his stay in Iraq. He wanted the recipients to know that he was thankful "to all of you who did not believe the media." Here are the "noteworthy" events he listed:

Over 400,000 kids have had up-to-date immunizations.

School attendance is up 80 percent from levels before the war.

Over 1,500 schools have been renovated and rid of the weapons stored there so education can occur.

The port of Uhm Qasar was renovated so grain can be off-loaded from ships faster.

The country had its first $2 billion-barrel export of oil in August.

Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time ever in Iraq.

The country now receives two times the electrical power it did before the war.

100 percent of the hospitals are open and fully staffed, compared to 35 percent before the war.

Elections are taking place in every major city, and city councils are in place.

Sewer and water lines are installed in every major city.

Over 60,000 police are patrolling the streets.

Over 100,000 Iraqi civil defense police are securing the country.

Over 80,000 Iraqi soldiers are patrolling the streets side by side with U.S. soldiers.

Over 400,000 people have telephones for the first time ever.

Students are taught field sanitation and hand-washing techniques to prevent the spread of germs.

An interim constitution has been signed.

Girls are allowed to attend school.

Textbooks that don't mention Saddam are in the schools for the first time in 30 years.

Has any reader of this article ever – even once – heard this good news on CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC or NPR, or read it in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times – to mention just a few left-wing media outlets that never tire of saturating their audiences with bad – and anti-Bush – news? I haven't.

No better proof exists of the failure of the MSM to climb out of their biases and present the American public with "fair and balanced" news than that provided by a soldier in Iraq to federalistpatriot.com after the recent Iraqi election.

"The media have it bass-ackwards," he said. "CBS, NBC, PBS and CNN just don't get it – their reports completely failed to show the incredible energy and joy these voters exhibited. People everywhere wanted to talk to us and thank us. This is what it must have been like when the Allies liberated Paris."

"The Iraqis' statements to us were all the same: ‘Thank you for your sacrifices for the Iraqi people.' ‘Thank you for making this day possible.' ‘The United States is the true democracy in the world and is the country that makes freedom possible.'

"A homicide bomber drove up to a polling site, which was not too far from us, but he did not kill anybody but himself. After the bomb went off, the Iraqi voters calmly walked out of the polling site and spit on the remains of the suicide bomber. The polling site stayed open and the voting continued. That incident ran all day long on Iraqi TV – but not on U.S. TV."

Read this anywhere in the MSM? I haven't.

Nope...me neither.