Thanks to the gray lady and the beltway bitch (among others)

Five years have now passed since the war in Iraq began. After thousands of Iraqi and American deaths and injuries, John McCain still cannot walk around in a Bagdhad market without heavy military escort.

It's worth taking a minute to remind ourselves how we got here. Neocon lies, belligerence, and the shamefully inept and incompetent mainstream media:

Looking back to that fall of 2002 when war drums were beating loudly and the president and his closest advisers spoke with certainty – and deceit – about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and the danger he ostensibly posed to our country and our friends and allies, most in the media either swallowed it whole or timidly refused to do their jobs and question the official rationale for war.

The great gray lady, The New York Times, and the voice inside the Beltway, The Washington Post, put dozens of reports on the Bush administration's claims about Saddam's quest for a nuclear weapon on their front pages. The few reports that even suggested that some experts were questioning those claims were buried deep inside, among the Viagra ads.

The same shamefully inept and incompetent mainstream media that is now gloating about taking Eliot Spitzer down. Here's a newsflash: Politicans of Spitzer's ilk are dime a dozen and taking them down is a BFD. Show me a self-righteous politician who doesn't have a skeleton in his closet and I'll show you a politician whose skeleton is the closet.