Democracy isn't a right-or-left thing, folks. It's a right-and-left thing, remember?

- Jeff Jarvis

Oh, the hypocrisy of it all. It's so mind boggling:

Sunday I watched the TV coverage of the Iraqi elections, and while I will say that Fox's coverage was slightly over-the-top euphoria (e.g. "an explosion caused 4 people to be killed": there was no way their newscasters were going to report anything in any negative light) and focused mostly on the Kurds voting in the north, it irked me that those reporters from the more left leaning news outlets were bending over backwards to try to find some negative angle. CNN had a reporter there, who was from the LA Times (it was confusing to me, too) and you could see the strain in this woman's face as she had to admit that everyone she had interviewed was happy and optimistic. It was a sad day for the MSM: they had to look very hard to find some bad news.

I had to smirk when they fell back on old faithful: visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed. But, aha, foiled again: all the interviewed soldiers remained positive, despite their sacrifices.

If it weren't a Sunday, I am sure they would have exploited a soldier's funeral, to re-iterate the (American) human cost of Iraqi freedom.

Unbelievable.

Chris Allbriton finished his election day post with this great summation:
Which is why, several of us journalists here are going to call this elections for the Iraqis. My friend Mitch and I were discussing this and regardless of who wins in the polls, the Iraqis won here and proved themselves—for a day, at least—stronger than the insurgency. And that's a very big symbolic victory. A huge one, in fact, and Iraqis should take great pride in themselves. When they had the opportunity, they stood up and were counted. The real losers were the Sunnis who didn't participate. They missed a golden opportunity to take part in a process that, while flawed, were the only game in town. I don't know what's going to happen next, and a civil war may still erupt, but if it does, the elected government—one elected by Shi'a and Kurds, for the most part—will have the moral high ground in it.

But the next day he remembered that some might feel validated through the previous day's elections, and wanted to quickly take the wind out of their sails:

This country is still a mess [...] Be sure and mention all this to the war-boosters, who are, dorkily, coating their fingers with blue ink as a sign of solidarity “with the Iraqi people.” Hm. I don't remember them doing that for Afghanistan... Why don't they just 'fess up and say they're giving the finger to us doubters? This is not solidarity; it's a taunt along the lines of, “We were right, nyah nyah!” instead of a celebration of democracy.

The House of Wheels has a good round-up of what the left leaning blogs had to say about Sunday.

And I loved this:

Let’s face it folks, to the Left the glass is ALWAYS half empty. That’s if they even see the glass at all.
None of the Left’s predictions about Iraq have come true, yet it is still a disaster, still a quagmire, still an evil right-wing/neo-con/CIA plot, etc. They accomplish this neat trick of logic by moving the goal posts. That should be their new motto “The Left, moving the goal posts since… forever.”

Jeff Jarvis sums it up best:

"Whether it's Kerry or any of these bloggers, it would be the grownup, mature, generous, humanistic, caring -- yes, dare I say, liberal -- thing to do to be glad that people who lived under tyranny are now giving birth to democracy. "