Sometimes-blonde Ashleigh Banfield opened her mouth the other day, perhaps to relieve the air pressure in her head. It got her (not inappropriately) in trouble with her bosses at MSNBC.

Among her many whinges, she complained that:

...the networks had portrayed the Iraqi war as "glorious and wonderful" because they had failed to show the bloody horrors of the battles.

Of course, here's the reality:

Reporters who have returned from Iraq have defended the networks' lack of blood-and-guts video, saying it was impossible to film much of it because of logistical reasons. They also noted that embedded reporters did not see action much of the time in Iraq.

"In my situation, I didn't have the occasion to videotape many bodies or anything," said Don Dahler, an ABC News correspondent embedded in Iraq who was interviewed April 16 after returning to the United States. "I don't think I would have shied away from shooting dead bodies or injured Americans..."

...correspondents have said it was impossible to film the damage because tanks and artillery were firing at targets miles away from them.

As far as I can tell, assuming that she's not a complete idiot (not a safe assumption, of course), she would have preferred for the press to be embedded with the Iraqi forces, since that would have been the only location from which one could have seen all of the carnage that she apparently craves.

Reminds me of a line from my favorite John Milius movie "The Wind and the Lion," where the Moroccan bandit leader Raisuli (played by Sean Connery) complains that "The Europeans have guns that rend the Earth! There is no honor in this!"