Unbelievable

I'll mention it in picture captions above, but really what the hell, three Presidential Medals of Freedom to a triumvirate of the biggest fuckups of the whole Iraq debacle. Were Rummy, Wolfowitz and Feith too busy fucking something else up to attend? Jeebus.

The East Room is the largest in the White House, and it serves as a stage for some of the mansion's most scripted events: diplomatic receptions, state funerals, prime-time news conferences.

Yesterday, it provided a platform for another kind of drama; a latter-day version of "A Christmas Carol," freely adapted from 19th-century London to 21st-century Washington.

On stage were three ghosts of the Bush administration's past: former CIA Director George Tenet, retired Army General Tommy Franks and Jerry Bremer, head of the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq after the U.S. invasion.

The metal dangling from their necks wasn't chains, as in the original Dickens story, but a newly minted Medal of Freedom presented to each by President George W. Bush for their service to him and the nation.

And the audience was full of other embodiments of Bush's Washington - past, present and future.

The past was represented by Colin Powell, the outgoing secretary of state, who fought and lost so many foreign policy battles with his neocon adversaries during the past four years.

The present was there in the person of Powell's great antagonist, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is holding on to his job for the moment in the administration's mid-course shakeout.

As for the future, there was Condi Rice, currently Bush's national security adviser, who is about to replace Powell at the top of the State Department heap.

As symbols of the quality Bush prizes most, Rumsfeld and Rice will do nicely. Both compiled records during Bush's first term that were long on loyalty but, according to their many critics, rather less conspicuous on achievement.

...

Then there were the awardees up on stage: Franks, who won his wars in Kabul and Baghdad and then was lucky or smart enough to retire before Iraq went sour; Bremer, who smartly saluted his superiors in Washington throughout his 14-month tenure and only later let it slip that he'd thought they were all wet about how many troops were needed; and Tenet, who assured Bush that proving Iraq had weapons of mass destruction would be a "slam dunk."

Li'l Scottie had to field questions about it all later, but silly-ass captioning is my thing, the gaggle requires a stronger stomach than mine and I'll leave that to Holden at First Draft.

Oh by the way, the Bush Administration?

Fuckers.