Happy Birthday “Mission Accomplished!”

You may only be four years old, but you feel like 400.

As of tonight, 3,212 American servicepeople have died since you became Accomplished, with last month, April 2007, being the fourth bloodiest month since your coming-out party. (Since it is a party, it would be impolite to bring up the scores of thousands of Americans wounded and maimed, nor the untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, wounded and/or left refugees from their own homeland.)

If we didn’t have quadrennial referenda on our choice of Commander-in-Chief in this country, you would no doubt continue Accomplishing your Mission, details of which have become increasingly shape-shifty over the years but include (though are not necessarily limited to) embroiling us inextricably in a thousands-of-years-old Sunni/Shiite vendetta Mr. Bush apparently had no idea existed, till the last smoking gun is pried from the cold dead hands of the final murdered American soldier on what passes for Iraqi ‘soil.’

Unfortunately for you, though, the countdown to your extinction marches inexorably forward, in spite of your Number One sponsor’s unflagging enthusiasm. On Jan. 20, 2009, when we swear in our next President, whether we are swearing in a Democrat, Republican or even another grease-painted howler monkey with a red nose and big floppy shoes, you can bet your ass we’ll be pulling troops out of Iraq on some trumped-up pretext or other. I guarantee they’re already field-testing feel-good slogans in phone polls across the hinterlands.

I’ve got one that’s corny enough to play in Peoria. How about: It’s mourning in America.