Coming to terms with failure: Iraq and the US government

There's an old cliche, partly true, about how people react to learning that they will die much sooner than expected. Disbelief, Denial, Anger, Struggle, Resignation, Acceptance is one way to put it (I don't remember the supposed stages and they're pretty varied anyway). With acceptance comes planning on how to make the best of a bad thing.

I think the right wingnuts are in the anger stage, but it sounds like the rulers are moving towards Resignation ...

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

... The government is in a strange and prolonged state of paralysis. Many officials in the Administration now admit, privately, and after years of willful blindness, that the war, in which almost twenty-four hundred Americans have died, and whose cumulative cost will reach $320 billion this year, is going badly and shows no prospect of a quick turnaround. Asked why the President doesn’t take this or that step to try to salvage what will become his legacy—fire his Secretary of Defense, for example—they drop their heads, as if to say: We know, he should, but it’s not going to happen. At the same time, they can’t quite bring themselves to abandon hope for a miracle.

Why have the New Yorker, Salon, The Atlantic and even The (non-editorial page) Wall Street Journal risen, even as The New York Times and The Economist have fallen?