Bush's Best. Week. EVER.

Ok, so let me get this straight.

In the last week we've had Iraq finally complete it's government by finding a Defense and Foreign Minister, Turdblossom's impending indictment and frog-march has fizzed just in time for him to bitch-slap liberals for being "cut and run cowards", the so-called "most dangerous man in Iraq" was taken out by a 500-lbs bomb that left the building he was in a pile of rubble (but left the man himself in prestine condition ripe for a snuff photo orgy around the globe), Ann Coulter has finally put those "Jersey Girl Harpies" in their place (Thank God, I was so sick of their whining), and the President just had a fabulous photo-op doing laps and shaking hands around the Green Zone before turning tail getting his ass out of dodge before somebody blew it off.

The Net result?

He's up all of two-points in the polls. So naturally the right is besides themselves with high-fives, "In your Face" and "Liberals are Demoralized" comments - is it just me or is anyone truly buying this pile of perfumed horse-shit?

Just look at what Glenn Greenwald has to say.

No matter how many times one flips through news channels this morning, one hears the same thing. The new Iraqi government has been formed. We killed Zarqawi. Bush has a "new team" in place. Karl Rove has been "cleared" in the Plame matter. Polls after Zarqawi's death show an "uptick" in support for the war. And now the President plans a secret mission to visit Iraq in order to meet with the new Prime Minister. Happy days are here again.

Or are they?

Our occupation of Iraq is three years old. As of two weeks ago, the long-standing consensus outside of the ever-dwindling circle of True Believers is that the Iraq invasion was a failure -- a mistake -- and the best we could hope for was to figure out a way to extricate ourselves from that country without triggering even worse disasters. For months and months, polls have showed that solid majorities of Americans believe the war was a mistake. That consensus didn't arise as a result of a single event, or a report of a car bomb, or because one bad thing happened. It was because the war itself has been failing fundamentally. Nothing that we wanted to accomplish was actually being accomplished. Everything we said before the war about why we needed to wage it turned out to be false and has been discredited. Far from winning "hearts and minds" in the Muslim world, few things have harmed how we are perceived in that part of the world (supposedly the current aim of our war effort) more than our occupation has.

These are fundamental, deeply entrenched problems with our war effort. But to the media, a photo op here, a cosmetic personnel change there, and the death of a single terrorist -- and all of those problems magically vanish. In two short weeks filled with melodramatic, exaggerated media events, both the Iraq war and the president's deep political problems have fundamentally improved. Big news! The President has turned all of this around. He is now bold and successful again.

We have to remember who we're dealing with here. This is an Administration that is addicted to theatrical bullshit. Codpieces and "Mission Accomplished" banners.

This is an administration that has been presenting fake news from fake reporters and pundits (Williams, Gallagher, McManus, Guckert) for years now. It's an admiinstration that rehearses supposedly spontaneous interviews with the troops.

It's been long argued that the Falling of Saddam's statue was staged. There even some surprising credible reports that U.S. Forces did not Capture Saddam, and instead he was captured by Kurds first.

By early Sunday - way before Saddam's capture was being reported by the mainstream Western press - the Kurdish media ran the following news wire:

"Saddam Hussein, the former President of the Iraqi regime, was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A special intelligence unit led by Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace. Qusrat's team was accompanied by a group of US soldiers. Further details of the capture will emerge during the day; but the global Kurdish party is about to begin!"

But it didn't stay that way for long.

By the time Western press agencies were running the same story, the emphasis had changed, and the ousted Iraqi president had been "captured in a raid by US forces backed by Kurdish fighters."

Now, I'm not trying to be Mr. Conspiracy Theorist - I happen to be a skeptic about just about everything, but some coincidences are just a little too coincidental to be true.

Let me just point to one conversation I heard this weekend between Mort Kondrake and Fred Barnes on The Beltway Boys.

The two were celebrating the killing of Zarqawi and saying that "if we'd followed Jack Murtha's plan to leave in 6-months -- this wouldn't have happened". Never mind the fact that Zarqawi was killed via an air-strike, something that can be accomplished from the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise - not from the Green Zone.

Then they went on to argue that we just can't leave now because the Iraqis simply aren't capable of handling thigns on their own. "If the President leaves Iraq, he'll be a failure".

No, if the President doesn't to get the Iraq Military to Stand Up and Take Responsibiity for their own country - he'll be a failure and so will the fledgling Iraqi state. It seems amazing to me that Conservatives who were frequently one for the old metaphor "Give a man a fish and he eats for day, teach a man to fish and he eats everyday..." seemed to have completely forgotten it's meaning. Our single shiny goal should be to make them self-sufficient, period.

Greenwald is right. This is a Pageant as Dustin Hoffman's character in Wag the Dog would say. The President tosses the softball, and Barnes/Kondracke/Hume try to hit it out of the park. But it's all a load of bullcrap. If we really have trained over 250,000 Iraq Troops, and both Saddam and Zarqawi could have been captured and killed by local forces and/or remote airstrikes -- why the holy fuck are we still there?

This is pure stagecraft. The Theater of Pain. And we're all trapped in the audience watching the slow motion trainwreck as it continues taking us on all it's merry way to H.E. Double Hockey-Sticks.

"Happy Days are Here Again".

woo hoo. Hey, is that light the end of the tunnel or another train?

Vyan