It is to laugh.

Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha worked their butts off, crafting a package that:

(a) required US troops to be fully supported for the FIRST TIME in the Iraq War, with adequate training, protection and a reasonable period of rest between endless cycles back to Iraq;

(b) gave Bush time for his ’surge’ period PLUS ONE YEAR to get all the troops home;

(c) added a number of ESSENTIAL pieces of legislation such as repairing the damage done by Katrina, three other hurricanes and severe weather, funding vaccines to avoid a deadly avian flu pandemic, raising the minimum wage for the first time in ten years, some tax breaks for small businesses and meeting the cost of other previous commitments the federal government had made. Two thirds of the $21 billion in add-ons was legislation that likely would pass as independent bills with broad public support.

(d) convinced most conservative Democrats to agree and several very liberal Democrats to agree to the final package that gained a narrow victory.

And after that achievement, after a vote to end a war that 69% of Americans want ended, possibly the most unpopular war in US history, consider the three ring circus that followed.

a) First came the GOP funny cars with a parade of clowns streaming out of them, honking their horns about the ‘pork’ in the legislation. And rightfully, about $7 billion of the $21 billion added on deserved that label, but that’s what helped to convince conservative Democrats to join the effort. And the clowns doing the honking had spent the last six years aiding the president in setting the biggest budget deficits in US history by spending half a trillion dollars on a war against a tyrant who was no threat to our country, including $9 billion that COMPLETELY disappeared in Iraq, and billions more lost to crooked contractors who overbilled for services they didn’t provide.

b) After the laughter died down about that, at Clown Central Station, the Clown-in-Chief complained that Democrats had set an ‘arbitrary date for withdrawal,’ overlooking the numerous times that he had set as deadlines for the Iraq government to get their troops trained and to overcome the political divisions so he could start pulling our troops out of Iraq. Every one of those deadlines proved to be arbitrary, the longest running, never-ending joke in US comedy history.

c) And in the funniest act of all, a moment that will stand as a classic that will make people laugh for many generations into the future, right after the conclusion of weeks of work done by the Congress, in a perfectly coordinated and timed appearance, the Clown-in-chief reached into his top hat and pulled out a whole line of US troops, male and female, multi-ethnically balanced, plus a few family members, officers, jugglers, a bearded lady, ballonimals and midgets… and he stood there in front of that limbo line with an absolutely straight face and claimed it was the Dems who had provided an ACT OF POLITICAL THEATER! (see the Fox video).

Hoooooooo-eeeeeee that was a funny one! Like ‘Who’s On First?’ or the Three Stooges doing ‘Niagara Falls,’ comedians will be memorizing ‘an act of political theater’ for decades to come.

I have to give the Bozo of the Beltway his due, as all I was expecting was his standard routine of telling Americans to ‘pull my finger’ after which he’d fart around Karl Rove’s well-embedded hand.