Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Irretrievably Convinced

It's the Energizer Bunny of bad reporting. The headlines just keep coming, and coming, and coming.

Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order. McCain's statement about Iran supporting Shi'a militias and al-Qaeda in Iraq was not a gaffe, despite being labeled one by just about every media outlet that has covered the story.

It's no different from, nor unrelated to, the widely disseminated assertion that Saddam's Iraq had "no ties" to al-Qaeda. Both statements are bogus. Both are lazy. And both, more often than not, consciously or unconsciously, result from politically motivated preconceptions that are wrong but difficult to dispel in the minds of the irretrievably convinced.