Four more years!

So, Chimpy McFlightsuit is going to commemorate four years of celebrating Mission Accomplished with his veto pen. It's the one he's only pulled out to support his Culture of Life by preventing scientists from doing research that could save lives and now, by refusing to consider ending the occupation of Iraq by US forces. He has said, many times, that he won't agree to anything with a timetable in it, and this weekend, he sent his Secretary of Hate out to the talk shows to explain that he also wasn't interested in requiring anything of the Iraqi "government":

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that President Bush will reject any attempt by Congress to require the Iraqi government to meet benchmarks as a condition for US troops remaining in Iraq...

The president and the administration are still prodding the Iraqi government to meet its goals for political progress and quelling sectarian violence, but the Bush camp does not want deadlines for them to be enshrined into law, she said.

"The benchmarks that are anticipated here, of course, [are] benchmarks that the Iraqis themselves have adopted. They are benchmarks that they need to meet," Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition." "We are telling them all of the time that their national reconciliation is moving too slowly [and] needs to move more quickly."

Now, this is an administration that doesn't believe in consequences or planning, so it's quite natural for them to decide that the Iraqi "government" should play no role in anything as trivial as getting our soldiers home and ending the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars into a giant black hole. And the Iraqis themselves are planning on taking July and August off (hey, just like ol' President Ranchhand!). The combined lesson, of course, is that neither the Bush administration nor the Iraqi "government" seems to have any interest in ending the occupation.

If you would like a little reflection on the costs of this disaster, the Democrats in the Senate have put together a little interactive map, showing the number of men and women from each state currently serving in Iraq, the number who have been killed, the number who have been wounded, and the cost of the war (in dollars) attributable to that state.

For example, here's the data from Illinois:

* Number of Active Duty Service-Members in Iraq: 7,124
* Number of Reserve Forces in Iraq: 1,449
* Number of Service-Members Killed in Iraq: 120
* Number of Service-Members Wounded in Iraq: 934
* Cost of War to the People of Illinois: $20.5 billion

(Source: CTS Deployment File, 1/31/07; Department of Defense Personnel Statistics; nationalpriorities.org)