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Mission Accomplished
I just walked down to my local town's public library and on the way I saw the same bumper sticker on three cars sitting in the driveways of three houses. The sticker says (if I remember correctly): "George W. Bush: 'Mission Accomplished.'"
Well, that's not exactly it. The word "Mission" is crossed out and replaced with the word "Nothing," so I guess you might say that it reads "George W. Bush: Nothing Accomplished" or "George W. Bush: Mission Not Accomplished."
You get the idea. It's a sarcastic message, making fun of Bush's famous aircraft carrier landing off the hostile coast of San Diego on Mayday 2003, when the proto-fascist- messianic-militarist-in-chief proclaimed victory in Iraq while wearing a flight suit before a giant poster proclaiming "Mission Accomplished."
On two of three aforementioned cars, a John F. Kerry sticker is also present on the back bumper.
Well, okay. Bush is unpopular as Hell (32 percent approval rate and falling) now for all kinds of good reasons which is only appropriate. Some ordinary Americans are making fun of his policy fiasco in Iraq and wish that Kerry had been appointed to the White House instead of Bush II (a result that an honest vote might have produced by the way).
But here's the first problem with the message on the Bush-bashing bumper sticker: Bush's missions haven't been worth accomplishing. They amount to a vicious assault on democracy and justice both at home and abroad. Of special note, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is an incredibly immoral and illegal violation of international law and every decent norm of reasonable state conduct. It's a fundamentally criminal power-grab based largely on the venerable U.S. imperial project of controlling strategically super significant Middle Eastern oil. It was a criminal disaster from the get go, though it has arguably gone much worse for Bush II than many would have predicted because the current White House is in fact remarkably incompetent and dangerous.
The filthy rich uberaristocrat Kerry would have done a better, more astute, slicker, and corporate-liberal job of handling the vile Iraq war mission, the basic parameters of which he did not reject and actually embraced in his contemptible 2004 campaign, when he basically said "elect me, I will do a more sophisticated and effective job of managing empire and inequality at home and abroad." He would have made the Ivy League prouder than his fellow Skull and Bonseman Bush. More competently perhaps, he would have stuck to the evil mission. He said so. The predominantly antiwar delegates at the Democratic Party convention were muzzled in the interests of national unity and proper militarist decorum.
Kerry also said that he was "not a redistribution Democrat," downplaying the nation's savage and democracy-disabling wealth disparities in an effort to reassure Fat Cat campaign funders and lobbyists that U.S. state capitalism's harshly inequitable socioeconomic pyramid would be preserved under his administration. And today, the non-opposition party has centrist Hilary and realist rock star Barack Obama (he of the campaign finance Midas touch) out criticizing GBW's White House for "incompetence" and "neglect" but not for high-state criminality and class and race oppression...not for acting on the basic intertwined imperatives of empire abroad and inequality at home, not to mention empire at home and inequality abroad. Obama supported the vile neoconservative Condi Rice's appointnment to Secretary of State (of all jobs) and raises money for the right-wing post-Democrat Joe Lieberman. He is not going to endanger his shot at the presidency someday by speaking the language that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in the mid-late 1960s. Hilary runs away from the virtuous Feingold censure proposal and drums up support for a flag-burning bill or some other such jingoistic nonsense.
And here's the second problem: "Nothing Accomplished" is incorrect. Bush has accomplished a great deal for those he once only half-joking called "my base" -- the super-opulent people of supreme privelege, the same tiny socioeconomic cohort from which he and Kerry come. Bush II has carried out a significant upward distribution of wealth and power, contributing to the erosion of popular governance and the collapse social health on a scale that might make even the commemorated, recently departed symbol and agent of global and domestic tyranny Ronald Reagan wince. That's a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, folks.
