Yo, time to Cowboy UP! "scabrous partisan attacks go unanswered "

Wesley Pruden ,editor in chief of The Washington Times nails it just right with this:"Better to confront misinformation with facts and trust the people to recognize the difference."


The Washington Times, "Mr. Rumsfeld is right about the double standard by which most of the reporters and their editors measure American sacrifice. A dispatch by Reuters, the British news agency that stubbornly refuses to call terrorists 'terrorists,' grudgingly reported a few paragraphs of what the secretary said and then cited a three-month old speech by a tiresome Senate critic of the war 'about the increased detentions and shootings by U.S. forces of reporters in Iraq.'
But citing the shortcomings of the media, which are many, and the bad faith of many of the reporters covering the Bush administration, which is well documented, is a fool's errand. Better to confront misinformation with facts and trust the people to recognize the difference.
For months the president and his men studiously declined to do that. 'The strategic decision was to be forward-looking,' a senior White House aide tells Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard. 'The public was more interested in the future and not the past.'
This is the kind of cliche the public-relations geniuses learn in 'schools of communications' and are wont to parrot when the grown-ups, like Karl Rove, are busy elsewhere trying to stay out of the way of ambitious special prosecutors and their compliant grand juries. Only a president with a degree from the Harvard School of Business would listen. Unfortunately, the public listens, too, and when scabrous partisan attacks go unanswered real damage is done. George W. watched his Gallup approval ratings sink from 52 percent just after his second inaugural, almost exactly his margin of victory, to 37 percent last week.
But now everyone at the White House appears to be awake, and the president and his men have found their fighting clothes. They can't afford to go back to bed."