Just because I'm feeling savagely dyspeptic
One year ago this week, the news was all, "Mission Accomplished!" w00t! Iraq: 0WNZ0R3D!!!
And yet. Car bomb at Baghdad police station kills 47. That was one of seven car bombs detonated yesterday in Baghdad, leaving more than 100 dead. The thugs who did this don't seem to be getting the message that we won already like a year ago.
Not that good things don't happen (I say, to forestall a linkalanche of good news tidbits from Buckethead), but holy hell. The lights aren't even on all the time yet in Baghdad, the country's capital where all the infrastructure is, and that was supposed to have been all taken care of last April (which is now seventeen months ago, if you're counting).
Between Afghanistan's slow decline into a Colombia-like conglomerate of warlords in which opium derivates are the legal tender, and the aforementioned ugliness in Iraq, I'm not sure that W ought to be campaigning on his foreign policy record (not that Kerry should either. Is there a third choice I can trust not to confiscate my land, regulate my sex life, or turn road repair duties over to Gomer and his dumptruck?). Perhaps that's why all this focus on typewriters, purple hearts, and how a slow economy actually looks fast if you ignore the prevailing indicators.
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The fact that the Jihadis are
The fact that the Jihadis are reduced to car-bombing indicates they're low on volunteers.
"Reduced?" What were they doing last year at this time?
While, as with many things
While, as with many things presidents throughout the ages have said, your interpretation of the "mission accomplished" banner is technically correct, it reminds me of Bill Clinton pointing out that head isn't technically cheating. That line of argument misses the point in a major way.
If you construe the "mission," as the Bush Adminstration did last year, as "getting the army to Baghdad," you might as well construe "having a baby" as "poking the wife" without paying any attention to the ensuing nine months plus eighteen years. That W is the President in charge here only matters to me insofar as he and his guys are the ones I am having a beef with. If Clinton, Reagan, Gore (no!!) or Kerry (gahh!) were in the same position, doing the same thing, I'd have the same problems with them. I'm an equal-opportunity heckler. (To carry my analogy one step farther into unnecessary roughness, any moron with a working peepee can do the easy part. The tricky part is raising the kid right.)
AS FOR the tax/economy thing, I refuse to blame the slow economy on the President. It's rare that monetary policy actually has the desired effect on the economy. I might as well fault W for Hurricane Ivan. However, I am one of those who thinks that different tax cuts, combined with spending cuts, would be a smart thing to do. Predictibly, the President takes every scrap of good news he can find, every preliminary quarterly number, and trumpets them to high heaven. However, speaking from a purely ad hominem, looking-around-the-state-I-live-in point of view, I don't see a whole lot of percolatin' going on in the economy, leastwise not that is spurring hiring, inflation-matching salary increases, etc., but I do see bread and milk up to $2 a unit.
I'm not sure I follow the car-bombing ===> low on volunteers axis; this is the first time I heard that particular argument. Can you tell me where that particular prevailing wisdom comes from?
"Major Combat Operations" was
"Major Combat Operations" was the mission that was accomplished last year, and, er, that doesn't appear to have been mistaken.
The President and his Administration never said "Iraq is totally groovy now". They never even said "it'll be like totally a cakewalk and stuff from here on", either.
The fact that the Jihadis are reduced to car-bombing indicates they're low on volunteers.
(Slow economy? And when it's "fast", the story is W's Horrible Policies Are Going To Cause Hyperinflation (no, seriously, I remember hearing that one the last time the numbers for a month looked "fast"). He can't win, can he? Nothing's ever going to be good enough, is it?)