Having just watched a particularly unedifying half-hour of Campbell Brown’s CNN show, I can attest that the media free-for-all surrounding campaign ‘08 is well captured by Victor Davis Hanson:

What is fascinating about the tingly-leg press is that they are exhibiting the very symptoms of arrested development and star-struck immaturity that they always accuse America in toto of suffering. The usual critique of the elite media is that we are a nation of mindless followers, who go from one fad to another, and value looks, youth, and pizzazz over substance.

But the current spectacle suggests something worse — that the press who claims they know better and are more sophisticated are, in fact, far more infantile than most Americans, and essentially Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and the National Enquirer dressed up with network logos and NY-DC bylines.

Dude, that’s what I’ve been sayin’ all along! But everybody knows it—if you’ve got a pulse and you watch even ten minutes of cable “news,” (which is pretty much the only “news” that exists on TV, since network “news” amounts to about 19 minutes per every 24 hours) you can’t possibly miss it.

It’s just how things are now, and the viewing audience is showing a lot of skepticism, as Rasmussen reported earlier this week. Television is an entertainment medium. All the information we get from it is dressed up in some kind of showbiz clothes. Our job as viewers is to try to figure out what we can trust and what we can’t trust.

Happy viewing!

And the news editors of theWaPo help him do it [e.a.] (whereas the editorial writers are “not impressed“); interesting development inside the Beltway!):

Sen. Barack Obama, on his first and likely only overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has remade the campaign’s foreign policy playing field, neatly sidestepping Republican charges that he has been naive and wrong on Iraq and moving to a broader, post-Iraq focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In essence, Obama has declared the war in Iraq all but over. “There is security progress,” he said during yesterday’s news conference in Amman, Jordan. “Now we need a political solution.” While a diminished U.S. force under his presidency would continue to protect U.S. personnel, target terrorists and provide training, he said, it would be up to Baghdad to consolidate the victory by “setting up a government that is working for the people.”

Two days spent in Afghanistan and two days in Iraq, Obama said, reinforced his belief that it is time for the United States to move on. Calling the situation in Afghanistan “perilous and urgent,” he said both U.S. military and Afghan government officials agree that “we must act now to reverse a deteriorating situation.”

Obama’s analysis has been buttressed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders who, to the dismay of the White House and Sen. John McCain, his Republican opponent, have publicly agreed with his call for completing a U.S. combat withdrawal from Iraq in 2010.

McCain argues that the United States is succeeding in Iraq — although the war is still not over — because of last year’s “surge” of U.S. troops, which Obama opposed. McCain’s aides and surrogates continued that theme yesterday, accusing Obama of what Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) called “a complete inability to acknowledge that the surge worked.”

Note how McCain is left to sputter: “But I was right and he was wrong!”

Meanwhile, I am left to note to Team McCain: You asked for it. You needled him into making his faux-presidential whirlwind tour of the globe. Now you’re reaping what you sowed.

The WaPo clears away the smoke and fog and nails Obama’s make-believe foreign policy:

Mr. Obama’s account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is “the central front” for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.