So, the President Gave a Speech Last Night

And he declared an end to the combat mission in Iraq. (Gee, where have I heard that before?) The full transcript of the speech is here.

My response is mixed. It was successful for the reasons Steve details here, and yet I still found the bile rise on the reiteration of the lie that "A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency." That there were no weapons in Iraq is not even a debated point anymore; if he'd even just said "A war ostensibly to disarm a state" that would have been something.

I grant my own bias, having typed my fingers to bloody stumps about the Downing Street Memo and other evidence the Bush administration cooked the case for war, but that is a bias of which I am proud, quite frankly. It infuriates me that the former president's lies are still having veracity breathed into them, no less by the current president, who ran on the claim that he was someone who knew better once upon a time.

There were a few other little (but not incidental) details like that, which stuck in my craw. But I won't belabor the point.

The war is (ostensibly) over. And the dirty hippies were right.