Kwitcher bitchin': It's elephants all the way down

You know the tale: A young boy asks his father what holds up the Earth, and the father tells the wee tyke that the world rests on the back of a very large turtle. "But what holds up the turtle?" the son asks. The father answers, "A huge elephant." "But," the boy continues, "what is under the elephant?" The father answers confidently, "Another elephant."  The son persists: "What's under THAT elephant?"  Sensing that he is rapidly losing control of the conversation, the father finally exclaims, "Son, it's elephants all the way down!"

And that's the Bush administration's answer to the question "Just how badly have you fucked up the Iraq situation?"  According to GOP supporters of Bush and the war, it's good news all the way down.

No amount of this so-called "reality" shite is going to shake their faith in how the cosmos is put together.  As long as one lone Iraqi remains able to buy a turnip from a wagon parked on the pocked pavement of a battle-scarred Iraqi residential street without being shot, tortured, raped, or blown to smithereens, Bush and the fawning contingents of the slavering Foxoid press are going to answer that, thanks to the intrepid intervention of the United States military, things are going just great in Iraq, by gum, and it's going great aaaaaaaaaaall the way down.  You're going to see that lucky Iraqi and his triumphant turnip-purchasing trek on every cable news network from here to McMurdo Research Station in sunny Antarctica.  And thanks to our fine, upstanding Republican Congress members and policy makers who are just bursting with magnanimous compassion and freedom sprinkles, you're going to see one of them alongside that victorious vegetable vendee.  Because, you know, they care about markets.  A lot.

John McCain is going to continue to show us that shopping in Baghdad is just exactly like driving to the Hy-Vee store in Tucson to pick up peanut butter and jelly.  Heck, it's probably safer!  After all, Iraqis don't have to put up with the horrors of PETA, welfare-sucking illegal immigrants pouring over the border to harvest your food, and commie-pinko hippies out in the streets--in broad daylight, mind you!--clamoring for decriminalizing marijuana.  

And for the duration of the foreseeable future, we're going to continue to hear GOP talking heads squeak and pule about how "the liberal media" isn't telling the true story of US progress in Iraq -- then trotting out inane yet precise statistics on the number of Iraqi children supplied with Hershey bars on a weekly basis, how many miles of water pipe have been laid in Basra, and data on the microeconomic effects of the bursting of the Baghdad housing bubble making housing affordable for millions of gleeful home-buying Iraqis.

So knock off trying to tell the world that the U.S. has literally lost billions of dollars in Iraq, stolen from Iraqis, raped women and children, brutally tortured innocent people, deprived entire populations of clean water and a steady food supply, forced closures of schools and hospitals, let native unemployment bloom while foreign workers are trucked in from other countries and paid pennies on the dollar, engaged in cover-ups of missions gone bad, shot families trying to flee the carnage, etc.  

Sure, these things happen! Good grief, there's a cloud to every silver lining.  But by focusing on the minute downsides to U.S. invasion, occupation, and decimation of Iraq, you're overlooking the bigger picture -- the bigger picture that's actually sort of like one of those velvet paintings of a big-eyed blond kid holding a puppy wearing a blue ribbon standing on the beach, backdropped by a majestic eagle silhouetted by the shining rays of a magnificent sunrise.  Those ugly little exceptions to the rule of calm and glorious nation building that the U.S. is benevolently showering upon the Middle East are mere mosquitoes in the lush and verdant Garden of Eden that the U.S. has turned Iraq into.  So kwitcher bitchin'.

The real story?  It's good news aaaaaaaaaall the way down.  Oh, yes.