In the spirit of blog civility, let me just note for the record that Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds is a thoroughly decent guy who has done more for this medium than any other twenty bloggers combined. Nonetheless, he's tragically, dangerously, mind-bogglingly wrong here:

When you go out of your way to report the bad news, and bury the good news, when you're credulous toward critics (remember the Boston Globe porn photos?) and treat all positive news as presumptive lies, and when it's clear that the enemy relies on press behavior in planning its campaigns, then you've got a problem. Huffing and puffing in response isn't constructive. . . .

Despite Matt's implication, I don't get up in the morning trying to figure out how to destroy freedom of the press in America. Instead, I keep trying to persuade the folks at Newsweek, CBS, etc. not to flush free expression down the toilet through their irresponsibility and bias. [Note: Reason link added]

Well, of course the enemy "relies" on our freedoms in planning his campaigns. He always has, from Lexington to Pearl Harbor to the dark and sometimes dangerous alleys of East Berlin. And while I understand that some conservatives choose to believe that this strategy was successful on one occasion -- that the war in Vietnam was lost due to the free and fearless exercise of American liberty -- all the right-wing revisionism in the world can't alter the simple truth that our policy in Southeast Asia was a noble mistake; nor can it obscure the fact that today, America stands as the world's only superpower, while Vietnam slowly and painfully struggles to find its way. Truth be told, the ash heap of history is littered with the mouldering remains of despots who believed that America couldn't be both free and strong, and I can't for the life of me imagine why Glenn would want to associate himself with that strange and oft-discredited notion.

As to Glenn's second point, I certainly accept his sincerity. None of us wants to see liberty flushed down the toilet. But I'm confused and more than a little disheartened by his seeming unwillingness to stand up for the American experiment. It's been quite a success, I hear, allowing an industrious and talented mix of mutts and castoffs to tame a continent and remake a world. That's not a bad record, friends. And it's more than deserving of our heartfelt and enduring devotion.