On the contrary, Judith Miller and much of the “mainstream media” did not take a very close, hard look at the Iraq war at the start and much cheerleading was to be found from Day 1. Journalists embedded with the troops provided a thrill unavailable with previous wars – we could watch videophone images of our tanks speeding across the desert. When the insurgency showed up on cue, we started to see that a lot of the predictions of this being a big ol’ cakewalk were wrong. When the WMDs were not found, that was another discordant note. More discordant notes came up as questions gradually arose about the rationale for the war and the actual conduct of the war. We watched as ham-handed attempts to create action-figure-style “heroes” fell apart (to be clear, Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch are heroes, but they are heroes for very different reasons than the Pentagon tried to paint them as).
If you go back prior to the Iraq invasion to the post-9/11 months, Bush had the press eating out of his hand. Time magazine was running cover stories on how Bush was a “man of faith” and running lots of pieces on Bush’s “clear-eyed leadership.” The real question is how did Bush lose folks so fast – all he had to do was to maintain the basic trust due a guy trying to do the best he could under difficult circumstances.
It’s a grave ethical infraction for the media to ignore the obvious problems with this war from the beginning.
A major part of Saddam’s plan was to have his Baathists melt away and start up a guerilla war. Although Saddam’s under arrest and on trial, we’ve still got his former minions blowing up our guys at a record pace. The “Mission Accomplished” stunt was a lot of malarkey.
What does the media care about the result? With a war, a hurricane or anything that keeps people in front of the TV or scanning the paper, the stations and publishers make money. You make this out to be some sort of monolithic thing that can actually think, but the truth is that the media is made up of zillions of individuals who struggle to get through the week’s news, writing history on the fly. Bush has his own Ailes-run network, Fox News, screaming out lots of propaganda in addition to their pathetic attempts to send out government-made “news” stories to stations across the country willing to play whatever the White House gives them.
There’s a great piece from the New Yorker from many months ago, in which the editors of the Chicago Tribune (loyal supporter of Republican candidates going back more than 100 years) talked about the flak they get from right-wing nutcakes who are absolutely sure that even the latest coverage of a local flower show is outrageously “anti-Bush”.
Fickle? Or perhaps the electorate is simply fed up with Bush violating their trust with lies, bad judgment, and piss-poor execution. Bush probably lost some people when he took his eye off Osama bin Laden to go to Iraq. Probably lost other Americans over WMD, still others over sweetheart deals to his corporate cronies. The ridiculous spectacle of our troops going about with junkyard scraps stuck on their vehicles at the same time while our sole supplier of armored humvees was not even working at full capacity probably lost a few Americans who thought they could count on a Republican administration to do right by the troops. Abu Ghraib shocked and scared Americans who grasped that the war against terror is a war of ideas. In the meanwhile, we saw the Patriot Act’s far-reaching provisions used for a host of non-terror matters. We saw the president pursue disasterous financial policies to give his rich buddies huge tax breaks in the midst of a war in which more than 2000+ Americans have given their lives. We saw the White House draw up enemies’ lists to exclude 42 people from the Social Security town hall meeting in North Dakota – decent American citizens barred from a publicly funded taxpayer event because they might disagree with the president.
There are a lot of reasons not to be happy with this president and not to trust him. None of them “fickle”. Let’s just hope this next election is about “values.”
The Republicans are already starting to distance themselves from the Bushian policies. Politicians will be politicians. Unless they’re lying scumbags like Bush of course. 
On the contrary, it’s a pity that Americans are only now catching onto what a load of crap the Bush presidency has been.
