What sort of timetable was it you didn’t like again?

Great minds think alike. Bob of Bob’s Links and Rants has done something I actually thought about myself but was too lazy to do: highlight the currently relevant bits of the Declaration of Independence.

Bush, speaking at Fort Bragg to the 18th Airborne, or, as he likes to call them, the 8th Airborne, has discovered the rhetorical device known as repetition:

Setting an artificial timetable would be a terrible mistake. At a moment when the terrorists have suffered a series of significant blows, setting an artificial timetable would breathe new life into their cause. Setting an artificial timetable would undermine the new Iraqi government and send a signal to Iraq’s enemies that if they wait just a little bit longer, America will just give up. Setting an artificial timetable would undermine the morale of our troops by sending the message that the mission for which you’ve risked your lives is not worth completing.

Then he adds, in case you were wondering:

We’re not going to set an artificial timetable to withdraw from Iraq.

Speaking of not completing one’s mission, the unit searching for Osama bin Laden was dissolved in December, and no one bothered to inform us. Says the first head of the unit (1996-9), “This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda.” Is it elitist of me to wonder if there’s a hint to the reason he never caught Osama in the fact that he doesn’t know the difference between degrade and denigrate?

Bush ended his little pep talk with this comment, worthy of a Victorian empire-builder: “You’ve kept America what our founders meant her to be: a light to the nations, spreading the good news of human freedom to the darkest corners of earth.” And then killing everyone they see.

Soldiers, with a penis-substitute. And I don’t mean the cannon.