Hitchens: the media helps terrorists

I've been meaning to post this since I heard it yesterday on the Hugh Hewitt show, but forgot. Christopher Hitchens -- who is much smarter than me, and certainly no conservative -- was on Hewitt's show, and he wrapped up the interview by relating a conversation he recently had with "a very senior person at a well-known network."

This person was talking with Hitchens about the media's coverage of Iraq, and specifically how that affects the terrorists who are fighting against democracy:

He called me the other day. This is not a guy who's in any way a conservative, and said you know, we've known each other for a bit. He said you know, I'm beginning to think you must be right, because it really worries me what we're doing, when we are giving the other side the impression that all they need to do is hang on until the end of this administration. Do people know what they're doing when they're doing this? One doesn't have to make any allegation of disloyalty, but just...if it worries him, as it really does, I think it should worry other people, too, and it certainly worries me.

He also described the Democratic Party's attitude toward the war as "a sort of fatalism, the feeling that if you can say a war is unwinnable, you've also said it's wrong. In other words, that you would desert the side you were on if you thought things were going badly. That's a moral degeneracy of a different kind."