They count on the American people being oblivious

Who is they? Why the media of course, the same people who think they can pawn Chris Matthews off as a journalist.

Betsys has an interesting post up about perceptions. First the perception that the US Military is broken as is postied by Time with its cynical use of a young soldier's death. Links provided.

The other interesting example of the media counting on the American people being oblivious to history, fact or reality is their current use of Reagan as an example of a good dead conservative. I remember Reagan before he was the darling of liberal journalists. Do you?

Ray Robison at American Thinker shows how absolutely misleading Time Magazine's story on "America's Broken Down Military" was. Time Magazine tried to show that Private Matthew Zeimer who was recently killed in Iraq was inadequately trained for the mission because of President Bush's speeded-up surge plan in Iraq. Robison demonstrates how absolutely false that conclusion is and how, just by using Google, Time could have found out the truth.

Of course, this is from a magazine that photoshopped in a tear on Ronald Reagan's face to show his lamentations for the state of the Republican Party today. Noemie Emery demonstrated Time Magazine's utter hypocrisy in their lionizing of Reagan at the expense of Bush simply by quoting from what that magazine wrote about Reagan at a comparable point in his presidency. According to Time in 1987, Reagan was a washed up, clueless president presiding over a ridiculous foreign policy. Here is what Walter Isaacson wrote in 1987 about Reagan.

As he shouted befuddled Hooverisms over the roar of his helicopter last week or doddered precariously through his press conference, Reagan appeared embarrassingly irrelevant to a reality that he could scarcely comprehend. Stripped of his ability to create economic illusions, stripped of his chance to play host to Mikhail Gorbachev, he elicited the unnerving suspicion that he was an emperor with no clothes."

And here was Lance Morrow in November, 1987.

Who's in Charge?" asked Lance Morrow in Time's November 9, 1987, issue. "Reagan's tepid and grudging reactions--reluctant and uncomprehending--confirmed a suspicion in many minds that Reagan, a lame duck with 15 months to go in his second term, was presiding over an administration bereft of ideas and energy. . . . The President seemed bizarrely disengaged." He seemed in fact just like Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, who rode a smile and shoeshine into utter oblivion. "Reagan seems to invite the thought that he has found a new model, the Salesman, in the last act, standing on a stage about to go dark."

And Time wasn't the only media outlet who had written off Ronald Reagan's presidency.

In the book The Reagan Legacy, a collection of essays published in 1988, David Ignatius of the Washington Post called Reagan's foreign policy an out-and-out failure, and said he was leaving a legacy of terrible problems for administrations to come. "Compared to the Reagan record of nonachievement, former President Jimmy Carter looked like a master diplomat," intoned the author. "Because he concentrated so much on image rather than substance, Reagan leaves behind an array of unresolved substantive problems. His successor will inherit a collection of outdated strategic premises, alliances that don't quite adhere, [and] roles and expectations for America that no longer hold." In the book Landslide, published the same year, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times and Jane Mayer, now of the New Yorker, reiterated the Time view of Reagan as reality-challenged, fact-averse, and inert in the face of catastrophe: "Far from bequeathing a dominant Republican party to his successor, Reagan no longer commanded even the conservative coalition that had brought him into power. Right wing activists who had rejoiced at his elections now dismissed him as impotent and soft."