I caught this throw-away in Maureen Dowd’s latest anti-Bush screed:
If [Bush] gets more explicit, or allows the flag-draped coffins of fallen heroes to be photographed coming home, it will just remind people that the administration said this would be easy, and it’s teeth-grindingly hard.
More calumnies follow. Now the question is: can anyone find a statement from any administration official who said that the post-war reconstruction in Iraq would be “easy.” Notice she wrote: “said.” Not implied or hoped or suggested. Said. So here’s a challenge for all my anti-war readers or anyone else to find such a statement. If none shows up by next week (maybe I’m wrong and missed something), we should make a stink. In the meantime, I refer you to this posting of last week, where I laid out the many statements of the president predicting a hard post-war period in Iraq. One representative quote from the president:
The work ahead is demanding. It will be difficult to help freedom take hold in a country that has known three decades of dictatorship, secret police, internal divisions, and war. It will be difficult to cultivate liberty and peace in the Middle East, after so many generations of strife. Yet, the security of our nation and the hope of millions depend on us, and Americans do not turn away from duties because they are hard. We have met great tests in other times, and we will meet the tests of our time.
That was February 26, a month before the war. They “said this would be easy.” Does she think we can’t read?
SHRINKING PENISES: Mark Steyn made a little fun about crazy Islamists claiming that Zionists were somehow shrinking their penises. The panic was spread by text-messaging, apparently. But the phenomenon is real and has the priceless name of “Genital Retraction Syndrome.” I kid you not at all. Big in the east.
The Dish 