Why do we get it, and they don't.

What a great piece by Mary Laney called Our accomplishments in Iraq make for long list in the Chicago Sun Times. She writes what a lot of people are thinking about and writing about on blogs.

"But here we get all the static, all the talking heads, and all the theories of what's happening over there. We hear politics instead of facts. We get editorials in place of reports. We have Congress tied up with some politicians making threats and insisting that we set a date to withdraw our troops or withdraw our troops immediately. We hear them making accusations that President Bush lied when he said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction -- even though former President Bill Clinton said the same thing when he was in office, as did others in his party who now seem to be suffering from an acute case of amnesia regarding the recent past.

The supreme ayatollah of Iran is urging a speedy pullout of foreign troops from Iraq. Now, if former President Jimmy Carter were still in the White House, perhaps that would happen. Carter was the president, you'll recall, who wrote a nice letter to the Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran after his country took over the American Embassy and was holding Americans hostage inside. But there's a different president in the White House today. President Bush is not backing down in the war on terror -- despite all the noise and all the chatter and talking heads who are criticizing him.

The noise is so loud about the war, yet we're not hearing what we need to hear. We're not hearing from the soldiers, the generals, the boots on the ground. Why is this?

The soldiers are putting their lives on the line daily, yet we don't hear from them or about them in the myriad reports coming out of Baghdad. The Marines are making certain schools are free of bombs and children can go inside to learn. Yet we don't hear from them. We only hear of the fatalities of the war -- not the victories of the war. We see pictures of the soldiers who have given their lives, but no pictures of the heroes who are, daily, making progress over there.

There are those who would like to set a date by which we will withdraw American troops. That's like playing poker and telling which cards you have and when you intend to play them. It doesn't work in war.

There are politicians who are using the war to try to tilt Americans to change their minds. They continually refer to Iraq as another Vietnam. It is not Vietnam. Vietnam was a black eye for America. It was a time where America pulled out due to public opinion and then watched the slaughter of the South Vietnamese people after we left. Iraq is not Vietnam. If we pull out of Iraq, al-Qaida will follow us right back home -- to New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Doubt it? Then you have forgotten 9/11 and just what happened after America failed to respond to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and failed to act when our Marine barracks, our Navy ship, and other American targets were attacked by al-Qaida.

There's too much static noise out there regarding the war. It's filling a vacuum caused by the administration's failure to keep us regularly updated on what is happening throughout Iraq. It's time for the Bush administration to step up and tell us what is going on -- with regular reports, weekly updates, fireside chats, talks with soldiers -- through the entire country of Iraq.

We're getting our reports from hotel rooms in Baghdad.

It's time for the whole story from over there."

Gosh, doesn't Ms. Laney just nail it in the first paragraph. And why can't the idiots on Capitol Hill or within the press understand that the terrorists will not slink away and destroy each other, but boldly come again to America's shores.