Hey and welcome to Thursday, a day for magazines! So, speaking of welcomes, remember Iraq? We were “welcomed” there in 2003 or thereabouts, right after—and because of?!—9/11. Turns out we liked it so much over there we never left. Ha ha. Well, to be fair, Dissent is still in an Iraq Of The Mind, what with their Spring 2009 Young Hollywood Iraq Package. Let’s invade it! MORE »

Just like children, catch phrases continue to age long after they quit being cute. And so it was with “Mission Accomplished,” a banal phrase on a banner strung up behind old what’s-his-name on that day, six years ago, when he dressed up like a space-pilot action figure and was flown in a little plane which landed on a big boat. We’ve all learned a lot since then, maybe. MORE »

JESUS CHRIST Republicans get away with everything when it comes to Warring, hmm? Barack Obama and Bob Gates raised defense spending by 4%, or $20 billion, for the new budget, but made cuts to missile defense programs — that would exist only so Sarah Palin could pretend that she’s shooting down Putin’s flying dick from outer space — and killed $140 billion in F-22 RAPTOR DEATH PLANE contractor looting schemes. The “new money” will be focused on Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet this has all been parlayed rather easily, on the teevee, into, “Why is Barack Obama not giving the Pentagon a single dollar, and why does he want to lose more wars?” [Washington Monthly, TPM]

Ha ha ha PSYCH, he did not go to “Iran,” as suggested briefly by the LA Times, but Iraq, its neighbor, the one with the war. Wars? The president stopped there even though he clearly hates Iraq, given his eternal pledges to get out of there and “bring the troops home” to Afghanistan. He probably handed out a fake turkey as a fun prank, as is the wont of American presidents visiting Iraq. Thank you to Sam M. for the screenshot of the LAT’s moment of terrible shame. [Al Jazeera]

You know what we love more than anything, at Wonkette? Birthdays! Love ‘em love ‘em love ‘em. And there’s nothing better than a sixth birthday. Even better than your fifth birthday! So grown up now, and all blown apart, and god knows how many hundreds of thousands of corpses, and we hanged your fuckin’ dad, ha ha ha. Happy sixth birthday, Iraq War! Weren’t you supposed to be over by now, what with the Hope and all? Maybe when you’re seven-and-a-half, little bitch. Who wants cake? MORE »

Oh here’s some big news: Barack Obama has officially declared defeat in Iraq! War is over and our troops are headed home in shame! Stay with us as our president explains how he is going to pull soldiers out of the Middle East, a little bit at a time, until at some point in the future we have mere tens of thousands of troops overseas instead of hundreds of thousands. MORE »

Bill Kristol, the tragically dumb wingnut who wouldn’t be published beyond the Free Republic comments section if not for his famous conservative father who could actually write, was publicly fired from the New York Times this morning — ending a yearlong national comedy in which, each Monday, he would offer some banal nonsense that, if it wasn’t completely and indisputably wrong before he even typed it, would be proven to be utterly false within a few hours of publication. There’s only one way to improve a day like this, and the parody blog “Big Hollywood” has the solution: Offer $100,000 to the movie actor Matt Damon in exchange for, uh, calling Kristol a dipshit in public somewhere. MORE »

When George W. Bush Junior started that goddamned whining during his Last Press Conference, we wanted to crawl through the television screen and throttle him, right there, while he was still technically president. Tragically, current television technology doesn’t allow this type of full-immersion interactive Wii hate — hurry up, digital teevee! — so we’re still pretty annoyed 12 hours later. Hmm, target for late-night rage, where are you? Ah, Fred Barnes! A comical human dildo, wearing eyeglasses! What kind of ludicrous horseshit could the Weekly Standard executive editor deliver for America, in our Hour of Darkness? George W. Bush was actually a great president, that’s what! MORE »

Your Wonkette prides itself on staying current with the latest entrants into the cancerous wasteland of Political Blogging, as it is our duty to inform America about where it should spend its non-Wonkette online time, instead of at the Huffington Post. This week, we have thoroughly studied the new “megablog” from Matt Drudge’s personal slave, Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart described his latest project, Big Hollywood, in a Moonie Times column this week as such: “Big Hollywood is not a ‘celebrity’ gabfest or a gossip outpost - it is a continuous politics and culture posting board for those who think something has gone drastically wrong and that Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots.” To answer your immediate question, yes, Kathryn Jean Lopez is a contributor. MORE »

An iconic postwar British playwright who hated America so much, Harold Pinter, died yesterday. He really despised George Bush’s war in Iraq, as well as the other American wars and killings: “The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.” Indeed, freedom is on the march. Let’s end with a happier quote: “When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you’re left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.” [NYT]

A very brave man once stood up in a press conference and took off his shoes one at a time and threw them at the President of America, who nimbly ducked because he still has the reflexes of a regular cocaine user. This shoe-throwing fellow was promptly taken to an Iraqi jail, where he was probably beaten, and now he will be tried for, let’s see, “aggression against a foreign head of state” on the very last day of the year. Translation: Muntadar al-Zaidi will be locked in a coffin of live rats and shipped to Dick Cheney’s basement at the Naval Observatory, where the Vice President will spend his New Year’s Eve skinning and stuffing the hapless Iraqi, who will become the latest addition to his growing collection of large mammal specimens. MORE »