Most of the nutbars I hear about now are talking about leaving because we shouldn't be there, not that things aren't getting better. They'll ignore the fact that the casualty counts are definitely down and point to the overall numbers, costs, etc.

All things that can be talked about, but that ignore the last few months of success.

Mostly because if things quiet down dramatically, it'll make Bush look better. And seriously - I don't think they care about the Iraqi people, just ensuring that Bush looks bad.

I'll warrant the two wars are separate cases...to a point.

The Nixon administration (and to be fair, the Johnson administration before it) openly falsified things such as the body counts we all saw on national TV ("Today NVA dead 145, VietCong 376, and US dead 2" reported on Walter Cronkite's CBS Evening News, for example) to the point where you couldn't trust anything that came out of either administration, so what actual good news there was, went the way of the boy who cried wolf.

In contrast, the current administration knows better that to try to pull something like that. So while the good that is being done is largely-- though not always--downplayed by the media (and let's face it, success isn't NEARLY as dramatic as failure! Drama=ratings=mo' advertising dollar), at least what good we do hear is for-real and not some BS cooked up by Tricky Dick's cronies at DoD.