It was eight years ago today...

When Dear Leader Bush informed us that we had triumphed in the Iraq War.


Greg Mitchell recalls how our star reporters and pundits fawned over him in At 8th Anniversary: How Media Heavies Hailed Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' Stunt Huffington Post 04/29/2011. And that didn't include just FOX News. He cites babbling adoration from Chris Matthews, Gwen Ifill and Maureen Dowd, who wrote:

Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics. Compared to Karl Rove's "revvin' up your engine" myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer's movies look like Lizzie McGuire.

This time Maverick didn't just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MiG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

We might have hoped our media stars would have learned something. We could hope for a pony, too. As Mitchell reminds us:

Even today, nearly eight years later, the often "overconfident" reporting from Baghdad and Kabul sometimes takes your breath away. At least two U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq this week so far, and over 45,000 of our troops remain there today.

Tags: george w bush, greg mitchell, iraq war

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