Cursor's Media Patrol - 10/20/06

With "stay the course" coming to the end of the road, and the alternatives "unpalatable," the temptations of a coup in Iraq are considered, and Thomas Ricks raises the prospect that Iraqis might find "a younger, tougher, more vicious person than Saddam Hussein, who unites the country under an anti-American banner."

Jonah Goldberg declares the Iraq war "a worthy mistake," while insisting that this is no vindication of the antiwar crowd and no reason to "bug out," and Robert Kagan produces 'Nothing New, in 3,800 Words.'

John Yoo celebrates of the passage of the Military Commissions Act as a victory over judicial oversight, and the New York Times is accused of wrongly suggesting that the law does not apply to Americans, but a BBC survey of worldwide attitudes toward torture is refashioned into 'The Sheer Damn Decency Index'

According to CBS's Dick Meyer, this is not another "Seinfeld election," but perhaps "a Survivor election," where "a bunch of people will get voted off the island," and if this happens, we may be headed for "a tumultuous couple of years" or even a "constitutional crisis" as "check and balance is introduced for the first time to Bush."

The New York Times highlights the "pre-criminations" of the conservative "blame game," and James Dobson is reported to be having difficulty motivating his followers for the elections," but the GOP still hopes to 'scare up big voter turnout.'

A number of prominent conservatives try using NAMBLA to tar Democrats, but an ad featured on the party's website provides evidence that that 'the GOP's last, best weapon' is fear.

The Bush administration's celebration of "an evolving economy" is countered by stories from "the new world of the middle class--haunted by debt, stalked by layoffs, pinched by vanishing pensions and health benefits, and forced into ever more contingent forms of work as 'real' jobs give way to benefit-free contract work."

As protests continue to grow over alleged ADL pressure to deny Tony Judt, a prominent critic of Israel, a platform to speak, a manifesto of liberalism calls Judt's critique of American liberal collaboration with Bush's foreign policy, "nonsense on stilts," but questions are raised about the manifesto's own priorities.