Stopping by Australia on return from a surprise visit to Iraq, the President bragged:
We're kicking ass.
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA-07), delivering a reality-based assessment in a House floor speech, quoted the P.O.T.U.S.:
... he told the prime minister, quote, "We're kicking ass" ...
McDermott was promptly and properly admonished:
The Chair would remind Members to refrain from using vulgarity.
But a more pointed critique came from Rush Limbaugh. From his customary cruising altitude, the rightwing intelligence community's all-seeing observational blimp:
- Promoted McDermott from the House to the Senate;
- Asserted foreknowledge of the Petraeus Report;
- Determined that "Baghdad Jim" (who counseled Vietnam War PSTD cases as a Navy shrink) "couldn't care less" about the troops left in harm's way.
McDERMOTT: ... Here's what the president's kick-ass assessment translates to on the ground: Ten US soldiers killed so far this week; 793 US soldiers killed so far this year; 3,752 US soldiers killed since the beginning of the war, and 27,186 US soldiers wounded since the beginning of the war, and 71,000 documented Iraq civilian deaths since the beginning of the war, although the actual number is much higher.
RUSH: Yeah, like the 400 to 600,000 you guys actually think is true. So what you have here, you have Baghdad Jim heading to the floor of the Senate to try to blunt the good news coming in the Bush report. The Bush report is okay, the Petraeus report is okay, but it doesn't say what the Democrats were led to believe it was going to say. It doesn't say we're kicking ass. ... It is not a braggadocios report. It doesn't beat the chest Tarzan-like. But the Democrats were all prepared for that, and here's more from Baghdad Jim.
McDERMOTT: "We're kicking ass," is the kind of assessment you hear at a football game and the PR game is clearly on by this president and his minions. They will claim progress next week and tease the American people with talk of token US troop reduction. But because it's coming from this White House, the only thing certain about next week is that it will be their latest attempt to try to mislead us into believing there are enough bullets and bombs and US blood to prevail in Iraq. The best military in the world is being run into the ground by this president.
RUSH: Yeah, the best military in the world which you couldn't care less about, Baghdad Jim, and you can't fool us.
Limbaugh, as you probably know, avoided service in Vietnam. He talked his way into a draft deferment for a pilonidal cyst, i.e., for a pimple on his ...
