Dear wankersphere: Any chance of an apology sometime soon?

And in a timely display of snark, TBogg has a piece on columnist and journalistic dipstick Don Surber, of whom a reader writes in:

On April 11, 2003, the Daily Mail's Don Surber crowed about the fall of Baghdad, "Opponents of this war will never admit their error... Critics could not wait to blast the war plan. They should have. It worked."

A week later, April 18, 2003, he wrote about the financial costs of the war, "Critics even got the price wrong. They said it would cost more than $80 billion. So far it has cost $20 billion and it might cost another $10 billion in the next six months."

Meanwhile the war's monetary costs have skyrocketed toward $280 billion, and the term "quagmire" seems increasingly apt.

If his earlier misperceptions concern him now, Surber hasn't mentioned it to the rest of us.

Which sets the stage nicely for a piece I was planning on writing anyway -- isn't it about time for an apology from the right-wing wankersphere, given their hopelessly-misplaced predictions regarding the Invasion Of Iraq and the War On Terror?

As we all know, back in '03, you couldn't turn around without bumping into another pompous, pretentious, bloviating, right-wing blowhard, crowing over the magnificent success of Operation "Kick the Living Shit Out of an Impoverished Middle East Country Crippled by Ten Years of Debilitating Sanctions." Oh, yes, there was no shortage of self-congratulatory preening, was there?

But fast forward a couple of years, and the sheen does seem to have fallen off of that rose, doesn't it? Perhaps a quick checklist to refresh everyone's memory:

• Terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in custody and paying for his crimes: Nope.
• Iraq's WMDs located and safely under lock and key: Um, nope.
• Iraq's nuclear facilities tightly secured to prevent them from being looted and perhaps sold to other nasty people: No, not quite.
• Iraq a democratic paradise, with deliriously happy citizenry and American troops preparing for a joyful homecoming: Not the last time I looked.
  
• Other Mid-East countries seeing the example of Iraq and rapidly falling into line, democracy and freedom-wise: Oooh ... definitely not. (See: Iran.)
  
• All of this neo-con, imperial adventuring paid for out of Iraq's oil revenues: You just wish.
  

Well, that didn't quite turn out the way it was planned, did it? (And I'm not even mentioning the 1600+ dead American soldiers. Oops, I guess I just did.)

Which brings us fill circle: When do we anti-war folks get that apology? And I don't just mean from the usual American blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Falafel, Michelle Malkin, InstaWanker, and so on. We certainly had enough wanks like that north of the border as well, like pretty much everyone at our national journalistic embarrassment, the National Post.

So ... I figure it's just about time for the apologies, no? Who wants to start? Come on, don't be shy. I've heard confession is good for the soul.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: It's not as if there aren't some folks having a gradual change of heart. Here, we learn that N.C. Republican congressman Walter Jones is not a happy camper these days:

It was a culinary rebuke that echoed around the world, heightening the sense of tension between Washington and Paris in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. But now the US politician who led the campaign to change the name of french fries to "freedom fries" has turned against the war...

Although he voted for the war, he has since become one of its most vociferous opponents on Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is lined with photographs of the "faces of the fallen".

"If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong," he told the newspaper. "Congress must be told the truth."

One, and counting.