Quote Of The Day: Presumptuous Edition

"The President took us to a preemptive war of his choosing based on his assessment of faulty evidence and trumped up facts."
-- Hillary Clinton

Gee, if it wasn't for those two his's, I'd figure Hillary is pretty darn presumptuous.

In the quote, she sounds like she's talking as if she'd already won and was still busy trying to explain away why she voted for the war back before she was president.

Dodging that little matter about her pro-war vote, Hill marked the 4th anniversary of the Bush "Mission Accomplished" speech on her Web site with the quote of the day and other flashes of mental indigestion including this oddly structured piece of work:

Never before has a President pulled a political stunt when so many American lives were and remain in harm's way.

Is there a grammarian in the house to help us figure out this temporally challenged sentence?

The Left's fixation on "Mission Accomplished" is in a sense just deserts for a poorly executed event. Of course, Bush's team didn't hang the banner, the Navy crew exuberantly did -- but why do you have advance men if not to look for obvious problems with the backdrop?

The mission was accomplished when Bush pulled up his jet on the carrier deck because Saddam had fallen -- but even at the time, that was a very narrow definition of the mission. Saddam wasn't even captured yet, and Bush's advance men should have realized that fact alone warranted the quick production of a new banner.

Be that as it may, the real reason the Left is miffed about the banner isn't the banner at all, or the fact that it turned out, to their sadistic glee, to be incorrect.

As you recall, when they first were reviled by the banner, everyone was pretty sure it really was "Mission Accomplished" and the Left hated that Bush was macho and self-assured and powerful ... and really could land a jet on an aircraft carrier despite all their harping about his military service.

What really galled them was this: We had Bush. They had Dukakis.



Historical sidebar: Michael Dukakis is so insignificant that Blogger's spell-check doesn't even recognize him!