WTF Is It Now?!?

A Proud Nation Should Be Sorry
'On Memorial Day, a grateful nation is meant to give thanks to all the servicemen and -women who have risked and lost their lives fighting on behalf of the United States. This last Monday in May will be no different.

'To all the servicemen and -women, alive, dead or injured in Iraq, we send out the following apology: We're sorry that you planned and executed your military strategy so remarkably well, only to find that the barnacles in Washington hadn't quite perfected their post-bellum game plan.

'We're doubly sorry they allowed the bed-lice correspondents to film the scene of your humiliation in detail, zooming in on all those brazen, smiling thieves waving at the camera and winking at you. We should have changed the channel when the insatiable 24-hour news networks broadcast that farcical footage ad nauseam around the world as evidence of Tommy Franks', or Donald Rumsfeld's, or Jay Garner's or somebody else's bungled command.

'We're sorry they made you exhibit A of their incompetence. You did your job. Those in Washington didn't. And you took the bullet for it.

'In short, we're sorry, as our hokey president himself might have put it, that you rushed to Baghdad only to be left holding the bag.

'We're sorry that our hardy-har commander in chief dropped like the dopiest of deus ex machinas onto the deck of an aircraft carrier and used you for the cheapest of all cheap photo ops. The sign over his head read "Mission Accomplished," but you knew better, didn't you? His mission was accomplished, sure. He'd had his slick victory and come out clean, even if you were left stuck in the mud - or is "quagmire" at long last le mot juste?

'Yes, regrettably, as it turns out, your buddies had to die in combat not in order to make the situation better in Iraq but, it seems, to make it worse and, of course, to get the president reelected. We're really, really, really sorry about that.

'But, then, I guess when it comes right down to it, sorry just doesn't cut it now, does it?' - snipped from Norah Vincent's piece, here.