This is how they think.

Hugh Hewitt appeared on AC360 a couple times last week on a panel report with Time's Michael Ware on the subject of whether or not the media is spinning the coverage of the war in Iraq out of some sort of anti-American defeatism. On both occasions, Ware cleaned Hewitt's clock. Of course, Ware was in Baghdad, which gives him a little more clout on the subject...

To do him credit, Hewitt subsequently had Ware on his radio program, where he interviewed him at length on how one covers a shooting war, and it is amazing reading. Not only amazing for what journalists in Iraq are having to deal with and the daily dangers they face, but for how Hewitt - inadvertently, I'm sure - reveals how the Keyboard Kommandos of Cult Bush view themselves.

At one point Hewitt interrupts Ware to tell him that because he, Hewitt, is broadcasting from the Empire State Building, he's as much on the 'front lines' as Ware, who has actually been both embedded with 'coalition' forces and has gotten inside insurgent elements and reported from there.

Hewitt also tries, fairly politely, to make the case that Ware's reporting from the insurgent side is the moral equivalent of going inside the Nazi regime to report on it (and I think most people during WWII would have found such reporting, if it could have been done, invaluable). Hewitt's point, not terribly subtle, was that there was something ever-so-slightly treasonous about Ware's reporting on the insurgency FROM the insurgency.

This to a man who has had a personalized death-threat from Zarqawi. Pretty brave, Hugh...

But there you have it; the cultists think we're fighting WWII and that they're on the front lines.

Anyway, read the whole thing for Michael's frankly hair-raising account of life as a journalist in Iraq today, his insight into the insurgency and where it sprang from, and the leavening of unintentional humor as Hewitt tries to make his role equivalent to Michael's.