And now, the good news from Iraq ... oh, crap.

[OOOOOH ... BONUS. I'm guessing that, when your entire genocidal, Middle East, neo-con, imperialist fantasy is turning to shit all around you, it's easier to lash out mindlessly at the people who saw it coming rather than suck it up and admit how full of crap you've been all these years. That's why they call US the "reality-based community."

SIDE ORDER OF BONUS: If you're feeling up to it, compare what I wrote with what Mr. Fly quoted, and notice the convenient omissions of my deathless prose completely unrepresented by your typical ellipses to show that something has been dropped. Quite simply, Mr. Fly happily quotes my position, while deleting my rationale for said position. Around here, we call that being a lying, little ratfuck. Down there, they call it being a Republican.]

Well, now, this is an ... interesting development:

Mohammed and Omar, the writers of the "Iraq the Model" blog, lost their brother-in-law to a terrorist bombing last week:

He was a brilliant young doctor with a whole future awaiting him, the couple were the top graduates in their branch of specialty. They had to travel abroad to get their degrees and the war started while they were there but months after Saddam fallen they decided to come back to help rebuild the country and serve their people.

And what makes it so interesting, you ask?

Well, for the longest time, the blog "Iraq the Model" was used as a shining example of just how swimmingly ducky things were in Iraq. If you suggested that maybe, just maybe, Iraq wasn't all it was cracked up to be by the Bush administration, why, a whole passel of wankers might just respond with, "Oh, yeah? Well, these Iraq the Model guys are Iraqi, and they live in Iraq, and they say different. Who you gonna believe, huh? Huh? So there."

Oh, yes, those boys were serious heroes to chickenhawks in the right-wing wankersphere everywhere. In fact, they were such relentless pro-Bush cheerleaders that some folks started to wonder if they were just a front for some U.S. State Department project. The New York Times thought it was worth checking out, as did Justin over at antiwar.com. I mean it's one thing to be optimistic; it's quite another to paint a picture so rosy and pro-American that you get invited to the White House to meet the Chimpster himself.

Which is why it has to be just a wee bit inconvenient for one of their relatives to have gotten himself blowed up recently. That puts a definite crimp in the story line, doesn't it? It's gotta hurt when one of the prominent voices proclaiming the wonders and security of Iraq takes that kind of hit. But, in a funny way, it's just part of a larger pattern. There seems to be a real epidemic of Iraq cheerleaders who, in one way or another, have absolutely no right to be painting a picture of democracy and progress over there.

With respect to the ItM guys, it's maybe not their place to be that perky if they've been living dangerously all this time, to the point where one of their own finally gets killed by "terrorists." But it doesn't end there.

There's been no end of Iraq-related perkiness from all sorts of wankers, from senior White House officials who only bother to pop into Iraq on "surprise" visits and scamper out a day later, having ventured no further than the security of the heavily-fortified Green Zone, to members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, who are just delighted to extol the virtues of Iraq from the safety of their law offices in Minnesota -- that sort of thing. (And don't even get me started on this egotistical, self-absorbed dumbfuck.)

But when reality intrudes in such a disturbing way, well, you get crap like this:

Stories like this fill me with heartache and despair over what has happened to Iraq, disillusionment over the American military's failure to protect its people, and near-uncontrollable rage at the sadistic Iraqi "resistance" and their blinkered apologists in the West. They aren't "freedom fighters". They're the opposite. They trample and spit on the graves of everyone who has ever fought so that his people may live in peace and freedom.

Yeah, Damian, let's dump on all those nasty, evil terrorists, shall we? That would be easier than admitting that maybe, just maybe, things haven't been as peachy keen over in Iraq as you and your Wankerville buddies have been putting on all this time. That would constitute an "oopsie" and, as we all know, you folks just don't do "oopsies," do you?

BY THE WAY, it is moderately amusing to see the wankersphere so distraught here. After all, these were the people who just didn't do "body counts," and for whom thousands of dead Iraqis were just "collateral damage" and, anyway, if you didn't like the current march toward "democracy," well, do you think they were better off under Saddam, huh? Well?? Huh???

To paraphrase George Orwell, even if all Iraqis are equal, I guess some are more equal than others.

TBOGG SAYS ... I realize I have a bad habit of linking to TBogg way too often but, seriously, how timely is this? And make sure you read the comments.