My thesis: The Minnesota Monitor has changed missions in the past few months; where they were once a dubiously competent but utterly earnest attempt at a “news” organization, it is now a walz-to-the-wall propaganda tool of the left.

So let’s dip our toes into a story that’s just a tad off the Monitor’s turf and/or expertise; the Iraq war.

Compare, contrast, and ascribe credibility via whatever standards you use to filter the news in this asymmetric world:

The Monitor’s source – David Schultz, Hamline professor also known as “The Larry Jacobs of the “Wellstone was a Moderate” set”, reports from his tenured office in Saint Paul:

“That should have been the headline in the media: Surge failed. But it didn’t play. It almost reminds me of when Oliver North testified before Congress back in the ’80s. He showed up with a chest of medals and everyone was dazzled by his presence. I just wonder if the media was similarly dazzled by seeing this general, and [was] unwilling to dig beneath.”

Nattering about semantics and subtext with a military speaker is like dissecting the underlying leitmotif of a hockey game; soldiers don’t work for speaker points. At any rate – score one “against” from Dave Schultz – plush-bottom yoohoo from an obscure college who was likely declaring the war lost before 9/11, and will be declaring it lost years after the last shot is fired in anger.
In the other corner,M ichael Yon – former Green Beret, who’s been reporting from Iraq for the past couple of years, a guy who had no problem bucking the Administration’s line on the war when it was needed (earning a ban from the Sean Hannity Show, and more power to him), says (among many other things – read the whole thing):

Equally misguided were some senators’ attempts to use Gen. Petraeus’s statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers’ achievements as “merely” military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni “awakening” was not primarily a military event any more than it was “bribery.” It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big “kinetic” military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.

Read the whole thing (and Yon’s interview with Glen Reynolds is worth a listen, too).

Compare. Contrast.

Place your bets.