We’re actually having a great time here in Iraq

The LAT has an article suggesting that Rummy & Condi went to Iraq to use the country purely as a backdrop for a message aimed at the American public. No kidding. You have to appreciate the irony that the two show up unannounced and uninvited, which they wouldn’t do to, say, China or Britain, to talk about how Iraq is fully sovereign now. They’re playing up the message of unity, by which I don’t mean the “unified government of national unity,” but unity between Rummy and Condi, who have evidently put all the fussin’ and the feudin’ behind them. Sez Condi: “We’re actually having a great time here in Iraq. I think it’s very stimulating for us both to be in these meetings with Iraq’s leaders together.” Cuz they really know how to party.

Hope the thought of Condi being stimulated doesn’t put you off your breakfasts.

Iraq’s vice president’s sister was just assassinated, two weeks after his brother was also killed. The BBC is too darned tasteful to tell us how many siblings he has left.

Army chief of staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker says of complaints about the size of the Pentagon’s budget request, “I just don’t understand.... What’s the problem?” adding (incorrectly) that Americans spend about the same amount of money on “plastic Santa Clauses and tinsel and all this stuff for Christmas last year.” All Schoomaker wants for Christmas is an invasion of Iran.

In a Supreme Court case heard Wednesday, the state of Florida argued that an inmate shouldn’t be allowed to challenge the constitutionality of lethal injection as cruel and unusual without offering his own suggestion for how the state should put him to death. Scalia, being Scalia, suggested that subjecting inmates to a certain amount of pain was okay and that calling for painless executions would be “a very extreme proposition.”