What? Seriously?

In case you’d missed it, the liberal media hates Pervez Musharraf. This could be because he’s actively undermined the war in Afghanistan, his prized advisor spent years selling nuclear weapons on the open market before being pardoned for it, he’s refused—for years—to aggressively pursue the Taliban or al-Qaeda into the western provinces (recall sympathetic publications like STRATFOR estimate it would only take a few tens of thousands of troops to do so, which is very much within the means of both Islamabad and Washington), or perhaps because of his capricious military dictatorship, which we would not even speak to until desperate to gain access to Afghanistan. Any of these reasons could be why “the liberal media hates Musharraf,” but it’s really just that they hate democracy and are trying to undermine the war on terror (a term, by the way, no longer in vogue at the JCS).

I used to laugh at the blatant lie that Musharraf was an enemy of the Islamists, or even a friend of the U.S. I mean, it is laughable when commenters on Gateway Pundit’s blog lovingly call him “our son of a bitch” while conceding the election was “hardly… free and fair” and running their own blogs crowing about democracy movements in Iran and Iraq. I guess only when democracy suits our purposes, then?

I generally stop laughing when I read things like Musharraf’s underlings trying to play off unrelated local pseudo-fighting as a part of their grand super secret plan to undermine the Taliban—that tends to make me frown. Reading about the decades of support for Pakistan’s radical Islamist madrassas, and then the Chinese reasons Musharraf decided to intervene at Lal Masjid (which conveniently enough revealed yet more operational ties between ISI and the Islamists) makes me moan with dismay. Then, reading the conservative determination that Pervez Musharraf actually opposes terrorism and is a reliable friend of the U.S., I tend to want to shriek with anger. How shortsighted and idiotic can you possibly be?

A great deal, it turns out. Gateway Pundit’s breathless shilling for a dictator would be merely groan-worthy if it weren’t tied to this person’s curious inability to distinguish between an Army general who seized power from a democratically elected leader and a “tinhorn dictator.” And he blames it all on the media, of course. I wish that were a joke.

Our watchdog media simply loathes representative government when it doesn’t go their way.

Yes, that is clearly what “the media” loathes.