didn't we meet in Aragon once - in this Restaurant where they cook this delicious stew

of beans and everything - i forgot the name but perhaps you can help me.

I work in the health care industry, and I can tell you that the problems facing modern medicine are very. very complex. And I can tell you that our health care system is in serious trouble, and I mean Ford Motors trouble.

But instead, we get to hear the press yap on and on about "arrogance" and other crap. All day, all night, crap, crap, crap.

Why? Because it is easier to yammer about John Edwards's haircut than it is to discuss the influence of Stark laws on the behavior of medical institutions.

I'm not very optimistic about our future. The public is getting what it wants from the media, not what it needs.

It's worth noting that the disease is not confined to the press, but is endemic to a certain kind of 'liberal' stance as well.

Frank Rich in excoriating McCain nevertheless refers in passing the Obama's 'vanity' (last Sunday). Today's Doonesbury strip has a (Hillary-ite) character call him "just a first term senator who's completely untested on the world stage." Add this to the New Yorker cover and you get the full spectrum of Roviana reflecting from our own guys, of their own free will. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to provide the motivations.

McCain & his neo-Rove team with little expenditure have just eaten Obama's lunch on the world-trip venture. More appalling than the predictable press uptake (and the equally predictable liberal meta-echoes) is what appears to be the utter inability of the Obama side to predict the predictable and to be ready with a compelling counterpunch.

Kerry lost it in August four years ago. Will we look back on this July as the repeat?

Don't worry, Obama is now powdering his hair to look more like the presidents you approve of.

As for the crisis (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan). Yes, somehow you missed it. Pick up the paper once in a while.

Thank you Glenn. I agree with you 100 percent. Everything you wrote is true, and I have been disgusted and dismayed by the role of the MSM in propogating negative images of Democrats originating from Rove and company. The latest McCain ad only aired 12 times. The Republicans don't need to pay for air time. They know the ad will be played over and over again and get plenty of coverage there. There has been criticism of the ad, but it's pretty tepid except for the known left wing outlets. And of course, there's always has to be at least one McCain surrogate defending the ad for "balance" in any discussion of it.

I don't know how it came to be that pundits have more power, control, and authority, newspaper space and air time than regular old journalists, who would just report that Obama spoke before a crowd of 200K in Germany and this is what he said...no spin is required there. I guess it goes to the overall trend of "infotainment" we seem to have fallen into. Opinions now appear to have the same weight as fact. Is it a fact that Obama is "arrogant?" No, it is an interpretation of how he conducts himself and the campaign, but the MSM presents it as fact. I was nauseated to watch a roundtable of Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, George Will and Stephanopolis literally tearing into Obama with almost a gleeful fervor. I think the words "arrogant", presumptuous and the like were repeated a good 50 times by the end of the conversation. Zero evidence to the contrary was presented, no other point of view was represented.

This arrogant, elitist, too popular theme seems to be the one that's going to stick to Obama. Based on what happened to Gore and Kerry, once a candidate gets labeled a certain way first by the Republican party, and this message is absorbed by the MSM, everything that candidate says or does is analyzed to fit into that label. It's almost as if the MSM is looking for evidence to prove that they were right in applying the charge to begin with. Nobody is ever going to say, you know what? I was wrong. He's not arrogant. He's just a man who has been very successful in life, is gifted and has a healthy sense of self confidence. No, everything he says and does will be filtered through the prism of the label arrogant. So, when Obama said he has a good chance of winning the election, that is construed as arrogant, rather than an optimistic assessment based on his poll numbers and how well his campaign is going.

The opposite is true in terms of McCain. He was labeled a maverick and a good guy back in 2000 and that label stuck and he's still reaping the benefits of that. For example, even though he has committed one gaffe after another and begun an increasingly negative, mean spirited, personality based campaign, the media continues to cover him from the perspective that he's basically a good guy and that these tactics don't represent the good McCain they know and love. But, he's still a good guy.

When Democrats push back too hard, they are labeled thin skinned or defensive. If Obama goes after McCain, there will be howls of unprecedented indignation in the MSM. How dare he, the arrogant upstart criticize the elder statesman, the WAR HERO!

I don't know how to unravel this situation and turn it around. I don't know how successful Obama can be in slipping off these labels now that they've been accepted by an uncritical MSM. Jesus, don't these people know that they're being played? Seems there isn't any strategy that will succeed in turning this around. I think he just has to keep running a positive campaign, keep rebuking McCain for his dirty tactics in a way that recalls Reagan's "there he goes again," spin. I think if McCain keeps up these ads, to the point that even Republicans get disgusted, then the MSM might wake up. One can only hope that Americans truly are tired of this shit.