"You're doing a heck of a job (insert name here)"

Warning: I'm in a snarky mood, but please indulge me. After all, I'm BWM (Blogging While Muslim) and just can't help myself ...

This seems to be the week that Hell may freeze over. Good old Rummy is still doing "a heck of a job" and Cheney is scarce, but Rove has had his duties limited to smearing the opposition in the upcoming mid-term elections and poor Scott McClelland has gone bye-bye. Poor Scott. I always wondered if there was a little man sitting behind the podium during the daily press gaggle, holding a fire extinguisher, ready to put out the fire in Scott's pants at a moments notice. And we never saw Scott in profile -- always full on. Was that because his nose was growing? It can't have been a fun job. The bets (as of 7:00 p.m. this evening) are that his replacement will be someone from Fox News, sort of lateral a move, as it were.

Speaking of smears, has anyone else notice how hard the right wing echo chamber is trying to get word out on John Conyers, Jr.'s alleged misconduct regarding using staffers as babysitters? Even CNN has drunk the Kool-Aid. But so far, it all points back to the American Enterprise Institute. Just how stupid do they think we are? The Honorable Congressman from Michigan has been very busy on the Hill, trying to get to the bottom of everything from the Downing Street Memos to impeachment hearings for Bush and the gang and gathering support for a single payer health plan for all Americans. Conyers is not DeLay (thank God) and the smear just won't stick, no matter what knife they use to spread it. So enough already. The story doesn't have legs. Just give it up. You're picking on the wrong guy.

On the topic of wrong, just whose idea was it to crown a Miss Iraq in the middle of a war? The poor girl was not the first choice (others had rejected the offer for good reason). But Miss Iraq has now gone into hiding in fear for her life. Why do I get the idea that whoever staged a Miss Iraq pageant during a time when all of Iraq is in turmoil, can't form a government four months after elections, and is still dealing with electrical grid problems as they come up to their fourth long, hot summer since "liberation", is part of the same gang that designed the "new" Iraq flag during the early Bremmer regime? Remember the one? A white flag with two dark blue horizontal bands with a religious symbol in the middle? If you squinted even a little, it looked Israeli. Ooops. That flag, needless to say, never flew in Iraq. Back to the drawing board.

And still on the topic of "wrong", what is Karen Hughes, our Good Will Ambassador to the Middle East, doing in Latin America? Does she now have a team of Spanish language translators or is she still using the Arabic ones? Having Karen Hughes as an Ambassador to the Islamic World was on a par with appointing Laura Bush to head a Gang Task Force (whatever happened to that brilliant idea from one Bush's State of the Union addresses?) or making steroid use in baseball a "federal case" via another State of the Union address just after the Mission was Accomplished in Iraq.

Priorities, folks. Priorities.