Democrat Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, on the recent elections in Afghanistan:

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Kate McMillan, writing at Protein Wisdom, tries to add a little perspective, and commenter Paul Bradley reminds us of the “perfect is the enemy of good” maxim:

But..but…but…it wasn’t “perfect” so its automatically “a failure.” I sometimes wonder if folks like TL [TalkLeft's Jeralyn Merrit] engage in the same all-or-nothing thinking about everything in their lives.

Diets: “Well I lost 5 pounds this week, but I’m trying to lose a total of 20, I’m not any better off than I was a week ago. It’s a failure”

Community Issues: “Wow, the burglary rate in my neighborhood fell from 20 instances to 10, but that is still well short of the ideal of 0, so I’m not any better off. It’s a failure”

I’ve always tried to place a good-faith, common sense approach to the idea of liberal bias in the media: there’s certainly a lot of truth to it, what with Dan Rather’s scandal, among so many other things, but sometimes it’s all a matter of two very simple things.

First is capitalistic greed: scandals sell, while puff pieces to make your heart swell with joy belong to daytime fem-talk tv or maybe what I call “the humanitarian media,” which brings me to my second point.

“The humanitiarian media,” whose news outlets, and their respective voyeuristic magazine-style shows and their reporters, that regularly cover philanthropic efforts across the world, have been quite mum on the subject of reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen one report on BBC (though I’m not really into TV these days so my sample is very limited) and this was about how reconstruction was moving slowly a year after the campaign started. I could wear my tinfoil hat and say that the media is conspiring to bring down the President and to downplay our troops, further endangering them, and boy can I ramble on about such conspiracy theories can I, but I have a much, much simpler theory on why they do not report on the good (other than it doesn’t make money):

Quite simply, most of the humanitarian media has opposed military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Any reports on the good that is happening there will be validation for our nation’s actions, thus making them look like hypocrites, or much worse, wrong.

And in a world like ours, being wrong is far, far worse than being decent enough to acknowledge the good that has come out of your enemy’s actions.