Mission Impossible

The CIO/AFL commemorates the five-year anniversary of Bush's staged aircraft event. If that failed PR attempt of wishful thinking rather than rational evaluation doesn't portray the complete inability of the Bush Administration to understand what they were doing, nothing does.

At yesterday's daily press conference, they again tried to claim that their only mistake was that the sign should have referred to the completion of the aircraft carrier's mission. This after-the-fact made up reason was skewered by Al Kamen in today's Washington Post:

The problem, sources tell us, is that White House planners couldn't figure out how to get all that on the sign in letters large enough for people to read on television. The sign would have been so big that either the wind would have shredded it or the ship would have drifted erratically while Bush's pilot tried to land on the deck.

Another option would have been to simply put an asterisk after "mission," and then down below, in illegible print, say "just for these sailors on this particular ship on this one mission." Some thought that too tacky and warned it might prompt sailors returning on other ships to demand that Bush fly out to greet them.

So that's why the banner came out the way it did.