Good to see the White House shift course again here. Apparently the "Mission Accomplished" banner draped behind President (sigh) George W. Bush in May 2003 didn't refer to the Iraq War, but to the specific mission of a Navy crew out at sea for 10 months, according to White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who was working as as the director of communications for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (executive summary: it sucked then and it sucks now) at the time that we won the war.

I'm guessing the USS Abraham Lincoln's mission was to live to see another deployment, in which case, the mission was indeed accomplished. Tangent: A brief list of missions I would like to see accomplished: Mission stop spending $12 to $21 billion in Iraq monthly/ Mission educate the fucking American public so assholes like George Bush never get elected again/ Mission don't alienate us from the rest of the world/ Mission don't provoke Middle Eastern instability, thereby driving up gas prices/ Mission create vehicles that don't run on gas, everybody knows we can fucking do it/ Mission Dana Perino Drop (think Operation Dumbo Drop but attached to a hostile Chuck Norris instead of a parachute).

"And I recognize the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every year," Perino said. Every year? As in the five fucking years in which we've still been in Iraq despite the mission being accomplished? The five years during which thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died from violence in Iraq? The five years during which we still haven't caught Osama (not Obama, Murdoch) fucking bin Laden? The five years during which a civil war broke out in Iraq? The five years during which the fucking "green zone" in Baghdad still gets bombed on a regular basis? The five years during which Bush proved he was even more inept than we all thought possible with his bullshit response to Katrina? The five years during which the economy has gone from "A-OK" to "We're all fucked, except for the wealthiest part of America, which could solve all our monetary problems by paying reasonable fucking tax rates in relation to their ridiculous wealth, but instead contribute their money to political candidates who ensure that taxes are not levied upon them?" Those fucking five years? Well shit, leave it to a cynical bastard to point out that the mission was actually accomplished five years ago. Fucking media.

So at this point, we've been fighting post-mission accomplished longer than it took us to take out fucking Hitler and the Japanese. "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," Bush said five years ago. Well, fuck me.