Rachael Maddow and the rapid descent of cable news

This will be an admitted rant. Having lived through 9/11, and dealt personally with the aftermath of our government's response, I have not felt an overwhelming urge to watch the litany of news coverage, as though nothing had happened in the last 10 years.

And then I had to see Rachael Maddow. While I hate Fox for what that network has done to journalistic integrity, Rachael Maddow and MSNBC have taken that low to greater depths of irresponsibility.

For those who did not see it, Rachael Maddow presented a program that to me is no different than Jane Fonda sitting in a North Vietnamese tank discussing the American "war crimes" in Vietnam, referring to our Prisoners of War.

I am in the military. I will be the first to admit we made mistakes early in the "post-9/11" period. Lots of them. But one thing about the military - unlike most organizations, we have the ability to not only learn from mistakes, but rapidly implement corrections. If we don't, people die. There were people who thought after 9/11 that "enhanced interrogation techniques" - essentially light forms of torture - would deliver results. In fact, they did not. We had to re-learn old experience - torture is not effective as an interrogation technique because the person being tortured will say anything to make it stop.

So, here I am in 2011 confronted by the same garbage accusations I have heard - and were dealt with - by 2004-2005. Discussion of Abu Ghraib as if it was last year, and not in 2003. And the whole time, Rachael Maddow making empathetic looks that say - "Oh, I understand that the government made you do horrible things." But there is no retort - no one saying that we have learned from our mistakes. We would not have turned the Sunnis in Western Iraq if we had not learned... we would not have decimated al Qaeda in Iraq if we had not learned... we would not be leaving Iraq now if we had not learned...

The name of the program is "Day of Destruction, Decade of War." The implication is we have responded to too great a degree. Which is all I hate about the new cable news. And here we have the crux of the problem - oversimplification of the issues. As Americans with a bicameral system, we like black and white. But our nation exists in a world of gray.

In the future, we will likely look back on this time as the second age of yellow journalism. My only hope is we survive this second age with no worse affects than the first in the early years of the 20th century.