Noah Shacht­man quotes Gen­er­al Petraeus:

In one part of the coun­try, the mil­i­tary is rein­forc­ing the soci­ety, build­ing things; in anoth­er, it’s break­ing them — wag­ing “major com­bat oper­a­tions” that aren’t all that dif­fer­ent from what might have gone down in 2003.

As I under­stand it, the “Mis­sion Accom­plished” in the famous pho­to at the right was that “major com­bat oper­a­tions in Iraq have end­ed.” Dun­no where I got that idea, since we’re still “wag­ing major com­bat operations.” 

This gets me to a point I’ve been pon­der­ing late­ly. Folks occa­sion­al­ly com­pare crit­ics of Pres­i­dent Bush to the rav­ing wingnut­tery that sur­round­ed the Clin­tons. The prob­lem is that Clin­ton Derange­ment was a mad­ness induced by Bill and Hillary alone. Peo­ple just did­n’t like the two of them. There were bumper stick­ers on cars with­in days of the ’92 elec­tion say­ing “Impeach the Pres­i­dent, and her hus­band.” Peo­ple con­struct­ed elab­o­rate con­spir­a­cies in which Bill and Hillary smug­gled drugs and mur­dered half of Arkansas to cov­er up their mas­sive crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cies, yet left no con­crete evi­dence beyond a stained blue dress. In terms of admin­is­tra­tion poli­cies, Repub­li­cans nev­er had more than mod­est quib­bles (to the frus­tra­tion of those of us on the left).

Con­trari­wise, oppo­si­tion to Bush is an exam­ple of a lit­er­ary device known as synec­doche – tak­ing the part for the whole. When Shake­speare refers to the Duke of Glouces­ter as “Glouces­ter,” or refers to a ship by say­ing “a sail!” that’s synec­doche. An Eng­lish teacher in my high school argued that call­ing some­one an ass­hole is “tak­ing the part for the (w)hole.”

In any event, the point is not that I’ve got some per­son­al grudge with George W. Bush. The prob­lem peo­ple have with George W. Bush that his admin­is­tra­tion is fun­da­men­tal­ly dis­hon­est, and is mov­ing this coun­try in a fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong direc­tion. When I com­plain about George W. Bush, I do so as synec­doche, tak­ing one part of that admin­is­tra­tion for its entire­ty. Sim­i­lar­ly, I offer this one bit of bla­tant hack­ery not as the basis for the claim that this admin­is­tra­tion is wrong­head­ed and dan­ger­ous, but as small, even incon­se­quen­tial, part of the whole mass of bad gov­ern­ment we’ve suf­fered under for the past few years.