In his review of the new documentary, Control Room, Lee Smith makes the following point:

There will always be a certain number of Western news consumers predisposed to believe anything so long as it attributes mysterious and sinister motives to the U.S. government. The problem for the rest of us isn't Al Jazeera or Arab-press-style conspiracy theories appearing in the Western media. Rather, the White House, with its accumulated misstatements and deceptions, has unwittingly collaborated with the enemy's public relations wing. By playing fast and loose with the truth, the Bush administration has created an atmosphere where Al Jazeera's paranoia and conspiracy theories almost seem legitimate.

Now, obviously, I not about to deny that many of the Democrats currently attacking the president on the credibility gap problem Smith describes above are doing so for partisan gain. (Welcome to the NFL, as the sports guys like to say.) But the concerns they're raising are legitimate nonetheless. In fact, many of us who initially crossed party lines to support the Iraq war have found ourselves disillusioned not by the increasing dangers and difficulties of the mission, but rather by this administration's seemingly endless willingness -- desire, even -- to substitute simple-minded PR nonsense for serious talk about serious matters. If Karl Rove and Co. manage to lose this election -- and hard as it is to believe, they well may -- their consistent deceptiveness on issues of grave national importance will surely be one of the major reasons why. And they'll have no one but themselves to blame.

UPDATE: As you can undoubtedly tell from the strained transition above, I was (rather inelegantly) using Smith's review to make a somewhat different point of my own about the administration's misadventures in Iraq. It turns out I should have simply waited a few hours and pegged my post to this thoughtful piece by The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum.

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