Grading on a Curve

Clusterfuckistan when viewed in light of actual neutral evaluatons:

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

The strikingly negative GAO draft, which will be delivered to Congress in final form on Tuesday, comes as the White House prepares to deliver its own new benchmark report in the second week of September...

While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments "would be more useful" if they backed up their judgments with more details and "provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies."...

The person who provided the draft report to The Post said it was being conveyed from a government official who feared that its pessimistic conclusions would be watered down in the final version -- as some officials have said happened with security judgments in this month's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

And in response, the White House whined GAO is too neutral and refused to put a thumb Norm Podhoretz on the scale.

"while we've all seen progress in some areas, especially on the security front, it's not surprising the GAO would make this assessment, given the difficult congressionally mandated measurement they had to follow."

Yes, as opposed to the "wanker's C" that George Bush would impose. After all it's only been $500 Billion, 3,733 KIAs, 30,000 casualities, a hundred thousand to a million killed and up to 2 million refugees, certainly by now we've got to cut the Bush Administration's war some fuckin' slack!