More Damaging than Downing Street?

This is big: US 'in talks with Iraq rebels'
Bilmon does a good job of summing it up so head over their and give it a read. He nails it with this however.

One assumes the Cheney administration is hoping its decision to negotiate with the terrorists (as the White House itself defines the term) will receive the same level of coverage the Downing Street memos initially got from the U.S. corporate media -- which is to say, either studiously ignored or buried in the back pages. Such, at least, was the fate of earlier, less detailed reports about negotiating feelers put out by the American side.

The Rovians better hope it plays out that way, because it's hard to imagine a story that could do more to collapse whatever public support is left for the war and the administration's conduct of it.

The basis of Bush's appeal has always been his obsessively cultivated image of strength and resolution -- of never backing down or looking for a way out of a fight. Likewise, the administration's last effective selling point for the war is the classic circular argument: America must stay in Iraq because it is in Iraq. Withdrawing before the "mission" is completed would show weakness and encourage the terrorists.

We need to make sure this gets picked up by the corporate media. It could well be more damaging to the Bush Administration than the Downing Street Memos.