In the midst of the 1988 presidential campaign, Michael Dukakis made himself look ridiculous by poking his head out of a tank, wearing a tank-commander's helmet. He was summarily hooted out of the race. George W. Bush was more gently handled in 2003, when he made the rest of us look ridiculous by his popping out of a jet fighter, wearing a flight suit, and capering under a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished," in the midst of a war he had started. As the heat gradually rose, however, the Bush Team took to denying that Bush had anything to do with the banner and that only the banner--and never Bush--had said "mission accomplished." The truth made these rhetorical redoubts untenable. But, we now learn, the mission was accomplished, as First Lady Laura Bush patiently explained to CNN's John King (May 3):
The fact is, when the president stood on the Abraham Lincoln, that Abraham Lincoln's mission was accomplished. They were coming into San Diego with all of their troops on board and that was the end of their term there in Iraq and in the bay.
Ah. If Gricean conversational maxims are going out the porthole anyway, why not simply claim that he meant that the banner's mission had been accomplished? After all, it had done all it was asked to do: hang there. J.R. Hand, for the Daily Kos, revisits Pres. Bush's speech on the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln.
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