Fantasia

Remember "the Surge" and how successful it was? Remember how we were celebrating "victory" in Iraq?

Remember how, not so long ago, some of us were still actually listening to the people who had been wrong about absolutely everything for five years? Some of us were even going to the trouble of debating with them.

Remember how Richard Perle, aka "Baghdad Dick" said back in 2003, And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.

OK, it may have taken a little over a year, but I want all you skeptics and all you America-haters who secretly favor the terrorists to know that Perle's prediction has come true. There was an inspiring ceremony in Baghdad recently, during which, as Bernard Chazelle describes it:

Iraqis could not contain their excitement yesterday as the old central Baghdad square was renamed after George W. Bush in a highly emotional ceremony. Following an ancient Iraqi tradition, an effigy of President Bush was held upside down as a show of respect and then burned to the ground. Collective jubilation reached its peak as the assembled masses broke into Iraq's new national anthem, "Bush the Babylonian Burning Man." Throngs of admirers were then allowed to show their gratitude by banging on Bush's head with their shoes. When the effigy fell head first into the crowds, adoring fans got a chance to pelt it with their own plastic water bottles and spit on it with their own saliva -- what a scholar at the Heritage Foundation has already dubbed "The Great Spit of Freedom." Thousands of grateful Iraqis held up giant signs that read "Death to America," obviously an innocent misspelling of the words "Our American Hero!"

So how abouit it, kids, did we learn anything this time? At a minimum, I wouild hope we learned three things:

1) To stop listening to "experts," all of whose predictions are always exactly, precisely 100 percent wrong;

2) That people who are not gung-ho for the next war are possibly motivated by patriotism and concern for the country's welfare, and are not necessarily enemy sympathizers;

3) That paying for trillion-dollar wars with a credit card is not a good idea.

Even if we did learn something this time, it's probably too late. I don't think we're going to recover from the last eight years. But I'm seriously glad the Iraqis had their renaming ceremony in that Baghdad Square, because the ceremony serves as both a synopsis and a final verdict on this criminal and moronic neocon Bush administration.