Happy Codpiece Day!

I almost forgot, and I would have but for the article I cited in my last post: it's been four years to the day since Drunky McStagger donned his flight suit and declared "Mission Accomplished!"

In that address, a frequent target of Democrats seeking to ridicule the president, he declared that the Iraq front in the global fight against terrorism had been successfully completed.

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," the president said from the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, just weeks after the war began. "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

The White House has argued that Bush was only talking about the initial toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime, and that he never meant to imply that all fighting was over in Iraq.

At the time, Bush's approval rating was 63 percent, with the public's disapproval at 34 percent.

Four years later, with over 3,300 U.S. troops killed in Iraq and the country gripped by unrelenting violence and political uncertainty, only 35 percent of the public approves of the job the president is doing, while 62 percent disapprove, according to an April 2-4 poll from AP-Ipsos.

Quick semantics lesson: re-read what Chimpy said: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." He was just talking about toppling Saddam? I call bullshit. That's a ridiculous interpretation completely implausible on its face.

Chimpy was strutting about to show that we'd won. And, indeed, in a way, perhaps we had, in that we achieved what we all were led to believe was the primary military objective: to remove Saddam from power.

So, if we won then, what of the thousands of American lives, and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, lost during the ensuing four years? And for what? We won on May 1, 2003, right?

And George's bulge grew three sizes that day ...