There isn’t any reason that this country can’t make it

HaloScan has added a feature that should allow the use of images in comments. Not sure how/if it actually works, but it should be fun. And they seem to no longer be displaying my Slim Pickens picture at the top of post pages.

Speaking of pictures, the editor of an Italian magazine that published a photo of Princess Di taken as she was dying defends the picture as “tender,” “She is not dead in the picture but looks as if she is a sleeping princess.”

Speaking of sleeping princesses, Secretary of War Rummy went to Afghanistan and Iraq this week, and I’m waiting for someone to explain what the purpose of these trips was supposed to have been. He did, of course, have some troops assembled so he could prattle at them: “You know, in the Department of Defense we work hard on jointness... Here in Iraq you’re making jointness a reality.” Insert your own don’t-ask-don’t-tell joke here.

He also tried to define for the troops “what ‘victory’ means”: “First and foremost, it’s helping the Iraqi people take the fight to the enemy.” Anyone spot the flaw in the logic? That’s right: if there’s still a fight, and you have to take that fight to an enemy, you probably haven’t achieved victory.

That was his entire definition of victory; there was no second part, he just rambled off about how the enemy won’t quit, and how in past wars “there have always been doubts and there have always been doubters,” adding, “They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. / They all laughed when Edison recorded sound. / They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly. / They told Marconi wireless was a phony, it’s the same old cry. / They laughed at me wanting you, said I was reaching for the moon. / But oh, you came through, now they’ll have to change their tune. / They all said we never could be happy, they laughed at us and how! / But ho, ho, ho! Who’s got the last laugh now?”

Rummy took the opportunity to pat Iraq on the head: “They’ve got oil, they’ve got water, they’ve got intelligent people, they have an industrious population, they have a proud history.” And moxie, he left out moxie. “There isn’t any reason that this country can’t make it.”