A Tale of Two Headlines

On Anniversary, Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success

On the third anniversary of a war that they once expected to be over by now, President Bush and senior officials argued Sunday that their strategy was working despite escalating violence in Iraq, even as a former Iraqi prime minister once favored by the White House declared that a civil war had already started.

Displaying a carefully calibrated mix of optimism about eventual victory and caution about how long American troops would be involved, the officials who marked the day — including Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld — sounded much as they had on the first anniversary of the invasion.

Change of heartland: On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, many Indianians are no longer strongly behind the war

The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion unleashed a surge of pessimism at a local farmers' market here, where stalwart Republicans, standing amid aisles of produce and miracle cures, said President Bush has messed up a war that looks more like Vietnam every day.

''It's chaos," said Roger Madaras, who voted twice for Bush. ''How many more people are going to be killed? We were going in to free the people of Iraq, but as far as I'm concerned, a lot of them are worse off today than they were under the dictatorship."

Madaras, the owner of a plumbing company, said he believed Bush when the president declared major combat to be over in May 2003, and is ''disgusted" that Bush's rhetoric was hollow.

The president and the rest of his administration have had a total break with reality—not just the reality on the ground in Iraq as reported by everyone without a political agenda, but the reality on the ground in America. Their little trick of simply repeating something ad infinitum until it becomes “the truth” doesn’t work anymore. They’ve abused it into ineffectuality. All they’ve got left is their idiot core who would keep supporting BushCo. even if they bombed the Blue States just to shut the yaps of those nasty liberals, declared martial law, and chose a goat-fucking pavilion as the sight for the photo op to announce their coup. No one else believes a word any of them say anymore. And they don’t realize it. They seem completely unaware that they look like total and complete assholes. The rest of us, however, are painfully aware of the reality they choose to ignore. (Thanks to Oddjob for the second link.)