"You want an apology? F***in' Whitman's Sampler?"

Report finds Iraq prospects bleak

Today's headline, the last in the Sopranos series, refers to Tony's words to Johnny Sack after Johnny expresses his exasperation that Tony didn't follow through on a planned hit on Carmine. Johnny, of course, gets what he wants in the end--not the apology, but the death of Carmine, his ascension to boss, and--oops!--his arrest at the end of season five. Bet that apology seems trivial now.

But as a matter of fact, I would like an apology--and a Whitman's Sampler (or, better yet, Godiva, Frango, or Ghirardelli)--from President Bush. He goes out on the stump every day with his "freedom is on the march" act as if it were 1944 and our troops were storming across Europe to defeat the Nazis. Things are going great in Iraq, he tells us, even as the death toll rises faster now than it ever has. His own intelligence reports, as explained by the link above, say that the best outcome Iraq can hope for is a murky quasi-stable one, while all-out civil war is a very real possibility. No one who's paying attention to Iraq--a group of people getting smaller every day as the war there starts to seem routine--believes that there will be a good resolution any time soon.

If that's the case--if Bush's Iraq policy has led to a disaster and nothing anyone does can completely fix it--how is it that he's running as the best person to "finish the job" there? His argument appears to be that he got us into this mess and we'd be crazy to let someone else take over. But isn't that why people lose their jobs? You don't keep a head coach around to rebuild a team his poor coaching has destroyed; you dump him, get someone new, and start dealing with the problems he left behind. Bush is arguing that Kerry would be less effective in Iraq and in the war on terror in general. How is that possible? Where is the bar set? It seems to me that any educated person in the Oval Office could prosecute these twin wars at least as effectively as Bush has.

It's a disgusting game he's playing, really. Bush is running on a record that he's making up. He's pretending the country is in the throes of economic prosperity when the evidence on the ground is stacked against him. He's claiming to have waged an effective war on terror while the people he said he'd get "dead or alive" remain at large and his biggest effort in that war, one that half the country thought was misguided from the start and that turned much of the world against us, has been an almost entirely unmitigated disaster. No matter what they may think of Kerry, aren't voters smart enough to realize that, while their understanding of Kerry is based on the spin of the Bush campaign, their understanding of Bush is based on four years of miserable failure? Can it really be true that, even when it's this important, if you lie big enough most people can't see through it? I really don't get it.