Last night I caught the NBC Nightly News and I saw something amazing. A positive, upbeat, fair story on the progress in Iraq by Jim Maceda. This appears to be the script.

A while back I talked to a friend at the White House who told me that things were pretty upbeat in the West Wing despite what you might hear from the press. The economy’s going great, the Iraqi elections are coming, etc. “The media,” he said, “are a lagging indicator.”

He was right, I guess.