With success like this...

Headline of the day (LA Times): “Schools Scramble to Find Questionable Meat.” I didn’t even know there was a shortage of questionable meat.

Secretary of War Robert Gates says that Friday’s suicide bombings in Baghdad markets are a sign of desperation, “a manifestation of the success of our military operations.” Woo hoo! And on Thursday, Gates said that the increasing number of casualties in Afghanistan caused by suicide bombings and IEDs is a sign that the Taliban have “failed in conventional military conflict with the NATO allies.” Double woo hoo! USA! USA!

A rather extraordinary sentence from John McCain, which I evidently missed two weeks ago: “It’s not social issues I care about.” He was talking about abortion and gays, the only social issues Republicans care about, but boy he really is running to be a president who will just occupy himself doing the war thing and not bother with any of the other piddling small stuff.

By the way, when I googled “It’s not social issues I care about,” looking for more context, Google asked, “Did you mean: ‘Its not social issues I care about’”. Et tu, Google? Et tu? Here’s that context: “It’s not social issues I care about. It’s the Constitution of the United States I care about.” That piece from the WaPo’s campaign blog also quotes him saying, “The rights of the unborn are as important as the rights of the born.” Absolutely, the right of the fetus to free exercise of religion, to bear arms, and not have soldiers quartered in the womb he or she inhabits, should be sacrosanct.