When will it end?

Will our corporate whore media ever be so overtaken with their collective guilt that the curl up into a small ball?

From Rolling Stone:

The news from Iraq is bad and getting worse with each passing day. Iraqi insurgents are stepping up the pace of their attacks, unleashing eleven deadly bombings on April 29th alone. Many of the 150,000 Iraqi police and soldiers hastily trained by U.S. troops have deserted or joined the insurgents. The cost of the war now tops $192 billion, rising by $1 billion a week, and the corpses are piling up: Nearly 1,600 American soldiers and up to 100,000 Iraqi civilians are dead, as well as 177 allied troops and 229 private contractors. Other nations are abandoning the international coalition assembled to support the U.S., and the new Iraqi government, which announced its new cabinet to great fanfare on April 27th, remains sharply split along ethnic and religious lines.

But to hear President Bush tell it, the war in Iraq is going very, very well...Staying on message, aides to Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, later suggested that U.S. forces could be reduced from 142,000 to 105,000 within a year.

In private, however, senior military advisers and intelligence specialists on Iraq offer a starkly different picture. Two years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is perched on the brink of civil war. Months after the election, the new Iraqi government remains hunkered down inside the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, surviving only because it is defended by thousands of U.S. troops. Iraqi officials hold meetings and press conferences in Alamo-like settings, often punctuated by the sounds of nearby explosions. Outside the Green Zone, party offices and government buildings are surrounded by tank traps, blast walls made from concrete slabs eighteen feet high, and private militias wielding machine guns and AK-47s. Even minor government officials travel from fort to fort in heavily armed convoys of Humvees.

"I talk to senior military people and combat commanders who tell me that the situation is much more precarious than admitted," says Col. Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief for the Defense Intelligence Agency. "Even inside the Green Zone you are not safe, because of indirect fire. And if you were to venture outside at night, they'd probably find your headless body the next morning."

Car bombs rock Baghdad and other cities virtually every day, and insurgents conduct hundreds of attacks each week on U.S. troops, Iraqi recruits and civilian police. Thousands of Iraqi police and soldiers have scattered or disappeared, and countless others either do no fighting or covertly support the insurgency.

...The new government is not only powerless to stop the attacks by insurgents, it is dominated by the same clique of warlords and exiles who lobbied the Pentagon to go to war in the first place, many of whom have close ties to the warring camps that control vast parts of the country. "In the Arab world, Iraq is seen as a zone of chaos in a pre-civil-war situation, held together only by the U.S. occupation," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Bush's father.

This article was posted up before the latest series of events that had left 270 dead in the previous nine days.

And this morning doesn't start out any better.

A car bomb targeting a convoy of SUVs has exploded at a busy intersection in central Baghdad, killing 17 people including four Westerners, Iraqi police and witnesses at the scene said.

Video recorded at the scene in the minutes after the blast showed several burning vehicles, while sporadic gunfire could be heard.

Police said three SUVs, the kind typically used by private contractors in Iraq, were destroyed.

The four Westerners who died were employed by a U.S. contracting company, but it is not confirmed if they were Americans, the U.S. military said.

Thirteen of the dead and 33 wounded are Iraqi civilians, police said.

Police said the blast damaged 36 vehicles and 10 nearby stores.

The explosion, heard at 11 a.m. (3 a.m. EDT), happened in Tahrir Square -- also known as Liberation Square -- just across the Tigris River from the Green Zone, witnesses said.

Purple fingers and cute aphorisms are not going to solve this mess. In fact, as time goes by it is becoming clear that nothing will. We've unleashed a civil war it appears, the worst possible outcome.

More than two years ago, in the late Winter of 2003, before the invasion began, I asked some confident supporters of Bush's policy what they would think if there were no WMD's and Iraq erupted into 'Civil War'?, would they think Bush's determination to invade Iraq worth it?, or a mistake that he should be made to pay for through the loss of their support?. Like many, when faced with such up or down questions, they demurred to the extent they could by saying, "well that won't happen"; but full of hubris they agreed with the hypothetical that they would indeed stop supporting Bush and agree the war was a dreadful mistake.

Well, the "internets" being a marvelous thing, I know that those same individuals are doing what intellectual summersaults that they can to avoid reality, even if it means that they only received their mental transmissions through James Taranto's excreble Wall Street Journal editorial page.

The press is bored and his base lives in a fantasy land. Well, that formula has been seen before. But when will they pay for it? And with so much media in the hands of so few, will they ever?

But FoxNews can get us into wars, and while it may not be able to be truthful about them and inform people of the true nature of things, Geraldo and Ollie North excepted, I think even they realize they cannot actually fight them.