Grounded

Our once-but-no-more BFF Bill had the most endearing habit: He would take press releases from the Pentagon (yes, that bastion of straight shooting truthiness) and post them verbatim on his blog under the rubric of Good News on Iraq! These could never be challenged because, you see, they were Straight from the horse's mouth - or something like that. If one attempted to point out the Pentagon's long history of bullshittery, well, one was met with a string of outraged invective along the lines of Why do you Hate America or How Dare You insult our troops - you know the line. Of course, one of the arguments they (Bill and his cohorts) would pull out of their asses put forth was that their information came from those who were "on the ground" in Iraq and since we war naysayers weren't "on the ground" we obviously didn't know what we were talking about. Really, it was almost sweet in its trusting stupidity, but I mustn't let nostalgia blur my recall of how things really went down over there in wingnuttia - We all know what would happen when any particular account that challenged the We're-Winning-'Cause-We're-So-Great narrative from on the ground reared it's contrarian head. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but think of Bill this morning (and it does appear that he is toying with the idea of starting to blog again - stay tuned!) when I read this account from on the ground in Iraq.