Yesterday, during an interview with Blitzer, Bush said, "I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma..."

Just a comma - this not-so-unusual quote from an overly-optimistic [to the point of being delusional] Bush, is interesting for a number of reasons, first off, it's staggeringly insensitive to the people who've lost someone because of this occupation. And I want to stress that when I say "people who've lost someone", I'm not narrowly referring to Americans - I'm referring to everyone who has been swooped up in this irreversible mess.

That "comma" apparently encapsulates the 2,700 plus US troops who are now dead - it en-capsules the 45,000 plus civilians who are now dead - the 19,910 injured for the rest of their lives - the 14,000 who have been imprisoned [the last 1 to 5 years] without reason, trial or access to habeas corpus.

Strangely that one comma somehow contains three of it's own commas... by that I mean the 317,451,180,000 dollars we have so far spent. But let's not forget that only days ago the Pentagon was reporting they were billions short for funding in Iraq.

If Bush were a sensible person he might have said, "this will go down in history as our country's greatest struggle" - which, just as much as the comma remark, would have been a huge lie, but still - it sounds a little better.

But this wasn't really a message to the people of this country - at least not all of us - he knows he's lost the huge majority and, in staying the course, isn't going to win us back, his message was to his "religious", if you can call them that, base. The people who would follow him even if... he started promoting torture. As Steve Gilliard notes:

When Bush said Iraq was a comma, he was speaking in dog whistle to the fundies. It comes from a saying "Never put a period where God puts a comma". Which means things will get better. Which is, of course, insane.