These pompous pundits and "journalists" mostly know that they really aren't smart enough and well informed enough to make an argument worth passing an average undergraduate paper, yet they know deep, deep down that the most important thing is to retain membership in an elite club they hardly understand.

I have a real education, too, and I too have visited foreign countries and talked to various cab drivers or military officers or well-connected politicians.

Yet I was never vain enough, and vapid enough, to believe that such things substituted for detailed research and logical argument.

They do.

And they do it again and again, in the service of any hawkish foreign policy initiative, always, over and over, just like the bosses' newspapers have done for a century since their union, ethnic, socialist, and other rivals faded away.

They hate the blogs just like they hated and looked down on every alternative media, until such time as they spot a story interesting enough to copy a year later, or until a real journalist such as Seymour Hersch turns to them because no one else will print their non-hawkish stories -- such as Hersch turning to publish news of the My Lai massacre in the Dispatch News Service a year before any mainstream U.S. publication.

The bleatings of right wing nutbags about how any amount of nearly accurate reporting from any war (for example, Vietnam or the rest of Indochina) is simply treason, the major news producers always align with the powerful, especially in regard to hawkish foreign policy initiatives, until such time as the initiative appears to have 'failed' in some way affecting the powerful.

(I saw "hawkish" because it's the hawkishness of the policy and its advocates which matters, not the party identification of the leaders.)

This is true, over and over and over and over. Though I haven't walked the Earth for centuries, I do have the ability to go to archives and look at coverage in major newspapers such as the New York Times or 'news' magazines such as Time (that bastion of right wing Luce nutbagness) and Newsweek.

Try it. Just for fun.

If you think there was a golden era where elite news producers all pledged to uphold the International Communist and Metric Conspiracy against hawkish US foreign policy initiatives, go back to the early Vietnam war coverage.

Or go back before WWII, to US occupations of various Caribbean and Central American states. Or to the mid-1960s as the US foreign policy establishment overthrew -- not just to their detriment but to my and other citizens' detriment -- government after government after government in Latin America.

Or re-visit the overwhelmingly friendly, though occasionally offended at some of the bloodiness, coverage of the need for Reagan to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Central America and Southern Africa during the 1980s.

In those cases, it's almost an exact parallel with Iraq War II, since mostly the pundits attempt to complain that the idea was good, but just, you see, the execution isn't as clean and competent as they had originally fantasized.

(Not to mention that wonderful program of arming fundamentalist Islamic drug dealing warlord terrorists throughout the 1980s so as to provoke a 'proxy' war with the USSR in order to destroy a secular Afghan government. Sure would be nice to still have those two World Trade Centers, which would still be standing if it weren't for that program. Shhhhh!!!, though, no one can ever, ever mention this.)

So the quick answer is, no, they will never learn this lesson on their own. Their ideas, no matter how lunatic and dangerous, are sensible and moderate and centrist and reasonable, and our ideas, no matter how sensible and moderate and centrist and reasonable, are lunatic and dangerous.

The next time there appears to be more or less a consensus on the part of the powerful that somewhere needs to be attacked or bombed or subverted or overthrown, the punditry will be there, to find the notion mostly acceptable, and occasionally to regret that the details aren't as they originally fantasized.

Sometimes its forgotten that a huge factor being dealt with in discussions of court and labor policies is that roughly 1/3 of the country was a semi-democratic dictatorship, the South, whose white supremist "Democratic" politicians existed primarily to keep federal authority from imposing democracy on the South (which last was defeated in the Southern white supremist terrorism campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s).

This had an impact on nearly every aspect of New Deal and war time reforms and investment, as everything which could be done had to be negotiated with the Southern white supremist Democrats (who in the 1960s through 1980s would re-emerge as Republicans) so as to not upset the Jim Crow system of tyranny and wage theft.

Opposition even to federal infrastructure investment in the South was rife in the South, though eventually dollars won out against racist paranoia.

Thankfully, FDR-led reforms and investment finally dragged the South out of its dangerous, ridiculous, pathetic and starvingly backwards 3rd world economic and development status, and despite it not being FDR's explicit intention, to help out in the coming battle to bring a minimum of democracy and human rights to the entire US.