How To Sell Death and Destruction Like a Pro

Matt Taibbi writing in Rolling Stone, The Magical Victory Tour:

Bush in person always strikes me as the kind of guy who would ask a woman for a hand job at the end of a first date. He has days where he looks like she said yes, and days where the answer was no.

She said No. But what is the purpose of Bush's December PR blitz about Iraq?

In the Obey Your Thirst/Image Is Everything era of American politics, Bush's National Victory campaign is a creepy innovation. It features the president thumping a document -- the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" -- that was largely written not by diplomats or generals but by a pair of academics from Duke University named Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Essentially a PR document, the paper is basically a living political experiment, designed to prove that Americans will more readily accept military casualties if the word "victory" is repeated a great many times in public.

Rolling Stone has been doing some great political coverage lately.

Taibbi got the chance to question Scott McClellan about the changing rationale for the Iraq War at a press conference. Scott The Sucker MC responded:

"Our arguments are very public," he said. "You can go look at what the arguments are. That's not what I was talking about."

He smiled at me. There's your strategy for victory in Iraq: Fuck all of you -- we're sticking to our story.

Someone needs to tell the Prez and his crew that their shit does stink.