The most damaging revelation about General David Petraeus did not come out during the two days of Congressional hearings. It came out in a small article buried deep in the New York Times. The Times’s intrepid reporter, Paul Vitello, visited Petraeus’s hometown, Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., and learned that as a young man the four-star commander was called . . . Peaches, “a nickname some impute to a rough reduction of his name, and others to the youth’s lack of facial hair.” Whatever its origins, that’s the kind of exposé no warrior would appreciate.

But aside from this blockbuster revelation, what was most striking about the article was this line: “Some said they were aghast at the dimensions of the problem, some awed by General Petraeus’s seeming grasp of the wildly irregular forces in play; but almost none seemed to foresee a happy result for “our side,” as many in this conservative, Republican-voting place put it.”

You’ve got to love those quotation marks around “our side,” as well as the sneering explanation. Apparently viewing the American war effort as “our side” is the kind of naïve viewpoint espoused only by country bumpkins in a “conservative, Republican-voting place” like Cornwall-on-Hudson (which is near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point). Presumably New York Times reporters and editors, who live in a liberal, Democratic-voting place, are far too sophisticated for that kind of thinking.

If you want to know why the MSM are having trouble re-establishing a relationship of trust with the bulk of the population, here you have it in a nutshell. They’re not on “our side,” or (to be charitable) they’re not willing to admit that they are.