 BECAUSE "I AM NOT A CROOK" WAS ALREADY TAKEN
Every president wants to be remembered for something. Harry Truman will always be remembered for his "The Buck Stops Here" sign, the Marshall Plan, NATO and desegregating the military. Bill Clinton will always be remembered interrupting a blowjob so that he could masturbate into a sink and inspiring a government report detailing same. If you were to ask most Americans, they would tell you that Clinton was the more consequential president. This is but one reason that the American government should get out of education entirely.
George W. Bush is lucky enough to preside over what I like to call the O.J Simpson period of world history. It really doesn't matter what you're famous for, all you need is to be famous to win. It is for this reason that the Juice gets more pussy than I do and Saddam Hussein was probably getting pictures from Kurdish girls showing their cooters in the mail as he was awaiting execution. What O.J and Saddam were famous for isn't nearly as relevant as the simple fact that they were famous.
President Bush currently has an approval rating of 22% - lower than Richard Nixon's was the day he became the only man to resign the presidency and faced the very real prospect of going to jail - a new record. Most people would look at a number like that feel emotions like shame, disgust or anger. I feel bewilderment, if only because it tells me that 22% of Americans would vote for Bush again if they could. For that reason, I firmly believe that a quarter of all Americans should be randomly sterilized.
Today marks the day that things went horribly, terribly and publicly wrong for the second Bush presidency. Historians will someday detail how things went awry almost from the second that Prince Hal W assumed office, but his contemporaries will always point to May 1st 2003.
The first of May always struck me as an odd day for an American president to celebrate anything as it is traditionally a day for communists to remember thier misadministration of half of humanity. But as time went by, May 1 was as good a day for the president of the United States to declare "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The only way that this war could have been more aptly framed is if it had started five days earlier.  President Bush's little stunt on the USS Abraham Lincoln was one for the ages. There was the president's crotch-enhancing flightsuit, his aerial dynamics and the declaration that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." The Democrats were of course hapless before such a spectacle. Everyone knows that liberals are afraid of heights and have tiny penises. Had things not gone as they did, we would have seen endless footage of it throughout the 2004 election season. The camera crews were there and ready, the jet was fuelled and the candidate had the single greatest backdrop in the history of political advertising. Best of all, the whole thing had been paid for by the American taxpayer. But things didn't go the way the way they were supposed to and major combat operations in Iraq were far from completed. As it happened, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his thuggish Ba'ath regime was the easy part, and the season in hell was just beginning. History's most expensive photo-op instead will be forever remembered as a monument to hubris, as garish and impractical as any of Saddam's many palaces. May 1st, 2003's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" was a fitting tribute to the most underplanned and undermanned military operation of its size the human history. And the signs of what was to come were already evident to anyone who was paying attention. After the April 9 fall of the Ba'ath government every city south of Mosul was racked by looting. Donald Rumsfeld called this a consequence of freedom, which is a "messy thing," but the Iraqi opposition saw it as something different. They saw that they could defy the United States with impunity. By May 1st, suicide bombing in the Sunni triangle had already started and the fearsome rumbling of the Sadrist militias were already being heard in the south. But it would be over a year before any administration official said the word "insurgency" out loud and a year after that before the phrase "geurilla war" was uttered. By the time the Bush administration recognized the reality of May 1, 2003 - which didn't happen until January of 2007 - the country was engulfed in a civil war. "Mission Accomplished" is something that should be forever remembered by those who care about history. May 1st is a day to remember not only the short-sighted foolishness of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowiz and Douglas Feith; but it is also a day to remember men like General Eric Shinseki and Lawrence Lindsey, who didn't oppose the war, but knew what it would require. They turned out to be low estimates - particularly Lindsey's - but the were intellectually honest and they lost their jobs for their trouble. Today is "Mission Accomplished" day and the White House's minister of propoganda press secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't be more insulted that anyone would have the temerity to bring that up.
"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year." That begs an important question. What price, specifically, did the White House pay? After all, it did get re-elected, which is precisely what the big show on the Lincoln was designed to ensure. They took a hit on what little credibility they had left, but that's hardly comperable to the price being paid by the young men and women of the American military each and every day.
They are under-manned and under-equipped. They are fighting a war that their political masters spent literally years denying the existence of. One day they are told that they're fighting for Iraqi liberity and the next they're told that they're little more than terrorist flypaper. In fact, the White House even blamed the "mission accomplished" banner on the very people it was designed to celebrate.
 And Dana Perino has the gall to complain about the press pointing that out? For a pretty girl, she has an exceptionally large set of balls on her. To people like President Bush and Ms. Perino, this is about the troops, the war, or even American foreign policy. Instead, it's another exercise in "the press isn't being fair to us." It's whining from people who pretend that they're the only ones grown-up enough to to govern. During his last press conference as president, Dwight Eisenhower was asked if he thought he was treated fairy by the media. In response he said "I don't see what a reporter can do to a president, do you?" That's something that all of his successors forgot. Reporters don't destroy presidencies, presidents so. And this one more than most. That's something else that should be remembered on this, the fifth "Mission Accomplished" day. I'm not a huge enthusiast for what journalism has become. When Paris Hilton takes up more space than Robert Mugabe, journalism ceases to be something anyone should take seriously. But they got it right on "Mission Accomplished." That's precisely what they should focus on and that's precisely the debate the public should be having. For an administration that urges democracy and open dialogue is the sands of Mesopotamia, they sure don't seem to encourage it much at home. And that's something else we should take "Mission Accomplished" to mean. "Mission Accomplished" will ultimately be remembered by history as the 21st century equivilent of "I am not a crook." But they are different in that George Bush survived and Richard Nixon didn't. And nobody died because of Watergate. "Mission Accomplished" is the legacy that President George Walker Bush refuses to embrace but will haunt him through the ages. Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Thorn in My Pride By: The Black Crowes From: The Southern Harmony and Musical CompanionLabels: ... And Then You're Gonna Die, Fun With Politics, Journalists Are Swine, The Department of International Relations, The Department of Professional Outrage
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