A successful endeavor

As always on St Patrick’s Day, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern celebrated in the White House. He gave Bush a bunch of weeds shamrocks, which Bush enjoyed receiving just a little too much.


Other Bushies were scattered across the globe. Condi was in Moscow.

“Hey shorty, my eyes are up here.”

Dick Cheney was in Iraq today for “the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the campaign that liberated the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.” Sometimes you forget that these people are actually proud of this war, and that pride is not at all diminished by the fact that it’s still going on after five bloody years. In fact, the longer it goes on, the prouder they are, because it just shows their unwavering determination. He called the war “a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor; that we’ve come a long way in five years, and that it’s been well worth the effort.” He doesn’t use the word “war,” not in any of the three sets of public remarks he made in Iraq. It’s a campaign, an endeavor, an effort, not a war. It’s even “a real success story”.


By the way, remember that Defense Dept report last week that said that Saddam Hussein didn’t have links to Al Qaida? Cheney said that that report really said that “there was a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that went back a decade.”


Interestingly, Cheney and McCain never appeared together, although they were close enough that Maliki had back-to-back meetings with them. Here’s McCain with the governor of Ramadi.


Must-read (and I mean it: it will be on the final): David Bromwich, “Euphemism and American Violence,” New York Review of Books.