On September 6, 2007, the Washington Post explained all the statistics about Iraq and the Occupation and the Surge in one sentence.
"If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."
General Petraeus claims the Surge is reducing sectarian violence because lots and lots of Iraqis have been shot in the face instead of the back of the head.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden were so stupefied by this insane gobbledegook that they calmly continued asking the ass-monkey Petraeus pointless questions while he pulled a booger the size of a small apple out of his nose and began eating it on national television.
Shoot in face, good! Shoot in back of head, bad! This demented gibberish toasted the brain of everyone who heard it! Only the heroic hairdo of Senator John Warner maintained its composure in the raging nightmare, and Senator Warner asked Petraeus the only intelligent question of the day.
"Is the war in Iraq making America safer?"
"It isn't my job to know that," Petraeus replied. "My job is eating boogers on national TV."
At least that's what I think he said, but the last wave of discombobolating baloney about Iraq has apparently fricasséed the only functioning cell in my brain-pan, smoke is pouring out of my ears, and all I want to eat is boogers.
...
(Editor X notes: The diarist apparently intended to justify his booger-eating metaphor in terms of the Lacanian agalma, the precious object in a worthless wrapper, which Žižek sees as "a hole at the center of the symbolic order." The edible (oedipal) booger negates the "thing that thinks" at the point where thinking collapses into the "abject Real." In this interpretation, Iraq is identified as "the Sublime Object of Ideology," and the booger is a desperate re-actualization of vérité-agalma, symbolically consumed by Petraeus under the wrapper of "inverted speech.")
(Editor Y dissents: Petraeus is simply a MacGuffin, a cliché-object introduced to "advance the story," as in Hitchcock's joke about two men on a train. "One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh, that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!'" In early versions of the diary, one Senator asks another, "What's a Petraeus?" The other Senator says, "It's a genius for preventing sectarian killings in Baghdad." The first Senator says, "There are no sectarian killings in Baghdad," and the second Senator either replies, "Then that's no genius!" or "That's no Petraeus!" or "Gack! Tweet! Hoo hoo!" in the last revision before the final draft.)