Sherry Chandler

This photograph, taken by Jim Young of Reuters during our president’s now infamous VFW speech this week, pretty much sums up the Bush mystique for me:

Making it clear he will resist Congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, he signalled US troops will be in Iraq as long as he is president and said the consequences of leaving “without getting the job done would be devastating”.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum points the way to Jeff Henley’s speculation of one way to declare victory:

Most civil wars eventually end, so the Beltway Consensus intends to ride the Iraqi one out. Assuming it concludes, whoevers in charge can declare victory, as if the whole point of invading Iraq was to eventually “end” the civil war that would break out as a result of the invasion. … Which is to say, if we end up with a basing agreement after an eventual armistice, the real purpose of the war will have been served. It just happens that they could never have convinced the country to waste thousands of American and millions of Iraqi lives (counting the refugees) and hundreds of billions of dollars on building some new forts where they’re not wanted. Which is why they didn’t sell the war on that basis.

To which Kevin adds:

True enough. The civil war has to end eventually, and George Bush’s plan seems to be to hold on and hope that maybe it burns itself out on his watch. You never know, after all.

And, on more or less the same theme, this from Josh Marshall:

And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.

By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on. Whatever happens, we’ll recover from it. And whatever might happen, there are things that matter much more to this country’s future — like whether we have a functioning military any more, whether our economy is wrecked, whether this country tears itself apart over this catastrophe. But we’ll go on and look back at this and judge what happened.

Not so for the president. For him, this is it. He’s not bigger than this. His entire legacy as president is bound up in Iraq. Which is another way of saying that his legacy is pretty clearly an irrecoverable shambles. That is why, as the folly of the enterprise becomes more clear, he must continually puff it up into more and more melodramatic and world-historical dimensions. A century long ideological struggle and the like. For the president a one in a thousand shot at some better outcome is well worth it, no matter what the cost. Because at least that’s a one in a thousand shot at not ending his presidency with the crushing verdict history now has in store. It’s also worth just letting things keep on going as they are forever because, like Micawber, something better might turn up. Going double or nothing by expanding the war into Iran might be worth it too for the same reason. For him, how can it get worse?

And when you boil all this down what it comes down to is that the president now has very different interests than the country he purports to lead.

And from Atrios:

As we round the corner (towards the light!), and head towards the beginning of the 6th year of the great and glorious war in Iraq, it’s probably a good idea to remind ourselves that for students entering college this Fall, the war begin in Spring of their 8th grade year. For those entering their freshmen year next year, the war will have been going on since they were in 7th grade.

For a growing chunk of the population, war has been a normal state of affairs during their formative years.

For commentary on the photo of St. George confronting his dragon, see BAGnewsNotes.

It’s Women’s Equality Day:

August 26 of each year is designated in the United States as Women’s Equality Day. Instituted by Rep. Bella Abzug and first established in 1971, the date commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920.

And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate it or to spend a Sunday evening than by going to Peace Work, an interactive program of poetry & music about cultivating peace with George Ella Lyon, poet, & Roberta Guthrie, cellist.

The program’s title “Peace Work” comes from quilting. It echoes the quilting bee as a community event where women gathered to stitch fragments of their lives together in beautiful patterns. Piece by piece the quilt emerged. Our hope is that, through listening to poetry and music and writing whatever response they call up, participants will experience peaceful hearts. At the closing of the program those who wish will place their peace words on a large poster with a quilt border.

The event takes place at 4 pm at the Quaker Meeting House, 649 Price Avenue, Lexington (map).

The event is free and open to the public. Donations will benefit the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice.