I don't know why, but when Jonathan Weisman's reporting at the Washington Post is bad, it's really irritating.  I think it's because he more than most 'straight' journalists is obvious about what he wants to say and fishing for quotes and sources to help him say it.  Here, for instance, is a typically article titled Democrats To Widen Conflict With Bush.

Despite the threats, Democratic lawmakers expect to open new fronts against the president when they return from their spring recess, including politically risky efforts to quickly close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; reinstate legal rights for terrorism suspects; and rein in what Democrats see as unwarranted encroachments on privacy and civil liberties allowed by the USA Patriot Act.

Note that Weisman supplies no evidence that any of these are politically risky, or that it's solely Democrats that see these laws as violating civil rights and privacy.  A few Google searches leads me to evidence to the contrary.  There's this ABC News poll on Guantanamo Bay (which is confirmed here).

A new ABC News poll finds that more than 70 percent of Americans oppose imprisoning suspects there indefinitely without charges. Many of the Guantanamo prisoners are suspected terrorists who have not been formally charged with crimes.

Most of the article is consumed with Weisman quoting insiders discussing how terrorism is scary and how Democrats need to be wary of appearing to knuckle under to terrorists.  There is no evidence that the public shares these apprehensions, or that the public has any role in the political process.  And there's no recognition that Republicans threw a bunch of aggressive ads against Democrats on wiretapping and terrorism in the closing days of the 2006 elections, and that they didn't work. The most feted was Nancy Johnson's wiretapping ad against Chris Murphy in Connecticut.  Lauded at the time by Republicans as possibly the most effective attack ad (copied by Republicans around the country, in fact), the ad was anything but.  Murphy crushed Johnson in the most lopsided outcome among Connecticut's Congressional contests, 56-44 percent.

Despite the fact that the public rejected the premise that standing up for civil rights coddles terrorists in the last election, and is doing so in polling data as well, Weisman is writing evidence-free conventional wisdom that suggests precisely the opposite.  I don't know why, but my sense is that he just thinks what he thinks, and he's going to find sources to justify his opinions.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent has more. Also, let me give a special shout-out to the wankerific Leon Panetta, who seems to have become the latest go-to Fox News Democrat.

Leon E. Panetta, who was a top White House aide when President Bill Clinton pulled himself off the mat through repeated confrontations with Congress, sees the same risk. He urged Democrats to stick to their turf on such issues as immigration, health care and popular social programs, and to prove they can govern.

"That's where their strength is," Panetta said. "If they go into total confrontation mode on these other things, where they just pass bills and the president vetoes them, that's a recipe for losing seats in the next election."

UPDATE AGAIN: Wow it turns out that Panetta was on the Iraq Study Group and is a big player in government propaganda producer and PR giant Fleishman-Hillard.

UPDATE, YET AGAIN: Weisman's article is even worse that I thought. Here's a video clip of Secretary of Defense Gates discussing the closure of Guantanamo. The discussion is how, not if.

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I'm heartened that Democrats, primarily in the House, are going to try to cut off funding for the escalation.  Still, there's a whole lot of nonsense in how it's being reported in the Washington Post today.  There are two particular examples of Jonathan Weisman and Dan Balz mangling history and the facts so as to explicitly hurt liberals.

Here's the piece.

Senior House Democrats said yesterday that they will attempt to derail funding for President Bush's proposal to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, setting up what could become the most significant confrontation between the White House and Congress over military policy since the Vietnam War.

Senate Democrats at the same time will seek bipartisan support for a nonbinding resolution opposing the president's plan, possibly as early as next week, in what some party officials see as the first step in a strategy aimed at isolating Bush politically and forcing the beginning of a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from the conflict.

The bold plans reflect the Democrats' belief that the public has abandoned Bush on the war and that the American people will have little patience for an escalation of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. But the moves carry clear risks for a party that suffered politically for pushing to end an unpopular war in Vietnam three decades ago, and Democratic leaders hope to avoid a similar fate over the conflict in Iraq.

As this chart shows, it was not the antiwar movement that cripped the Democrats on national security.

Democrats suffered not because they sought to end the war in Vietnam, but because Vietnam was a Democratically initiated war based on lies. The well-known phrase 'credibility gap' came about because LBJ was not trustworthy, and that's why the party fractured and the public stopped trusting Democrats on security.  The national security skew started in 1967, and widened considerably in 1968, during the Tet offensive.  Tet was not an antiwar movement, it was a military strike by the Vietnamese that showed that Johnson was (a) lying and (b) a bad military commander.

The reason the Democrats suffered is because a towering Democratic figure made a massive mistake and lied about it (sound familiar?), but the notion that the post-Vietnam antiwar sentiment was the cause of Democrats' low credibility on national security is false.  I know it's been fun to repeat for thirty years, but it's not true.

The second piece of nonsense is as follows.

House Democratic leaders have said they will not use the power of the purse in any way that would harm troops in the field, a position that had run afoul of the party's liberal activists.

That is a mischaracterization of the antiwar movement, a piece of lazy bullshit.  Weisman and Balz should try to find a Democratic or progressive leader that wants to take a position to harm troops in the field.  They should try because they won't find one.  What we object to is a failure to use all political means to stop Bush's insane war. It's Bush and the Republicans who are hurting the troops (body armor anyone?), and who have zero regard for national security.  This antiwar equals antitroop idea is just false and needs to stop.  It's lazy, it's not true, and it's a disservice to the public to report it as fact.

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