These are the Talking Points from moveon.org for letters to newspapers. The explanations are mine.

It’s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq.

Begun. That process started the first day of the war. When we win, when the region is stable, and able to afford humanity, we will be gone. There is a price for humanity. If you aren’t paying, well, perhaps a soldier is paying for you.

The president offered nothing new in his speech. No plan. No exit strategy. Nothing.

He spoke to those of us with normal attention spans. But just for moveon, once more into the brink:

If someone in South Carolina commits a crime in Georgia, Georgia doesn’t go to war with South Carolina. There is a system in place to enforce our set of shared values, the minimal requirement to being a part of a shared humanity that recognizes basic human rights (you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness… that sort of thing). Those rights don’t have to stop at our borders. Moveon likes the idea of world government, as long as they are in charge. They don’t like the idea of shared world values, though. Thomas Jefferson and the others, thank God, did.

There is no country called Wahhabiland, or Terroristland. Humanity is world wide; evil also. Evil has been defined as “that which has contempt for humanity.” We share humanity with everyone on the planet, whether they live in South Carolina or southern Baghdad. The goal in this war is to implement the enforcement mechanism for the set of values we share with the Islamic world. We want the basic minimum necessary, no more. No baseball, no hot dogs, no apple pie. Just life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We already have the shared values. They were given us by our creator. George is simply setting the enforcement mechanism. Peace loving people, which we are, which George is, don’t like having to enforce the basic rules for humanity. But we like even less the world we get when those rules aren’t enforced. You know, the continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short thing. We don’t want to leave that world to our children. We want a safe place. So we have to get rid of the people who want to kill us. We all have a shared creator, a source. This war is going to that source and enforcing the basic rights given us by that creator. (It isn’t George Soros).

Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded.

Oh, please. Walter Cronkite beat you to that one years ago. We are winning. Things are getting better all the time. Every week. No Tet Offensive reporting here, boys and girls. The world isn’t that dumb anymore. Good people have power now. We fight now. We make the world right, now. You are showing your hatred. Relax, think happy thoughts, and remember the words of Stephen Stills: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” George really is a good man. Put a little love in your heart. It’s easy if you try. Imagine all the people living life in peace! If you join us, the world may live as one! But first, there’s that nasty little problem with the bad people…

The evil that exists in the Arab world guarantees that people are going to be killed. Those sacrificed that September 11 were housewives, (oops, let that bad word slip in), grandmothers, little children, and plain innocent working people. Our soldiers are sacrificing so the innocent, so our way of life, so freedom, so the basic minimum rights of humanity, don’t. They are true modern day super heroes. They are protecting us, and our future.

The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. Our presence is exacerbating the problem. There are tens of thousands of insurgents backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters.

Fanatical Islamists are the cause of the war, not the result. Come on, moveon, Walter had it easy because there was no fact checking other. You just can’t get away with stupidity anymore. The insurgents, the terrorists, attacked us. We attacked them. Now you’re surprised at how many of them there actually are? George knew.

We got into this war based on lies – the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality.

Well, someone is definitely out of touch. Here is a harsh touch of reality for you: when people jump from 105 story buildings, they fall for 9 seconds. The resulting thud announces an exit from a reality so harsh you can’t even comprehend. “Insurgents” planned to kill as many humans as possible. They have contempt for all humans outside their religious and political control. To rid the world of aggression resulting from this contempt, it must be stopped at the source. There isn’t a lack of shared values; there is a lack of a mechanism for enforcing those shared values. Good powerful people must use their power to provide the enforcement mechanism.

George, and many people in Iraq braver than you can even imagine, are providing that mechanism.

We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability for our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq to the international community. And we must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq because that angers the Iraqi people.

OK, Pollyanna, it’s tiresome, but once again: The exit plan is to leave when the mechanism for enforcing the basic rights for our shared humanity is in place. There are many Iraqis and Arabs capable of enforcing these rights. They just need some help getting started and established. When they can function on their own, we are out. The terrorists don’t need to know our timeline. But there is a timeline. It is well established. The timeline for enforcing the basic laws of humanity is… are you ready? The timeline for enforcing the basic laws of humanity is (don’t tell anyone)… forever!

--Mike Fulford

The weapons of war are truly amazing. Guided missiles can target a specific window in a specific house from miles away. But greater weapons have always been used. Millions were killed when we prematurely pulled out of Vietnam. The main weapon in their death was…

Words.

By Walter Cronkite.

A certain type of words, linked together to form…

Lies.

Because we won the Tet Offensive, and would have won the war.

But everybody believed Walter. He said this, after the Tet offensive:

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

Not as victors…

In total, about 35,000 Communist soldiers were killed, 60,000 wounded and 6,000 were captured. The U.S. and allied dead totaled around 3,900 (1,100 U.S.).

Peter Braestrup, a respected journalist of the time (unlike Walter, still is) wrote a book on the news coverage of the war.

"Rarely has contemporary crisis journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. . . To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other—in a major crisis abroad—cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism."

Guess what the worst offending newspaper was? Yes, just like today, the New York Times. Many of their staff publicly joined anti-war groups.

Dear old Walter. The “Most trusted man in America.” Just like all the other mainstream media elites of his day, he put his own perceptions ahead of reality. He convinced others his lies were true, and thus millions died.

And that’s just the way it is.

--Mike Fulford