Must Be A Graduate Of The Geraldo Rivera* Military Academy

A famous person once said victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is a Cubs fan. Or something like that. Anyway, we impress you with our historical expertise and highly developed recall abilities as preface to today's discourse on the conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom, or as it is known in popular circles, Vietnam II: AWOL in the White House.

Republicans are fond of telling those not born with the sense god gave a box of Saran Wrap the many reasons we should be excited by the prospect of losing an entire generation and bankrupting the country by staying in Iraq. Republicans, you see, are the party of national defense. Cut and run democrats would have left Iraq years ago and let the terrorists win, or worse, follow us home and tear up the yard on their little terrorist bicycles, and scatter the trash at night like terrorist raccoons.

Luckily for the defense industry though, we've been in the firm grasp of republican war experts for the last seven years, and as a result America is safer today than it's ever been in the past. Also poorer, but after all, who else knows more about getting other people to fight their wars than republicans? Of course, some republicans are better at that than others.

The Pentagon told representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican lawmaker that he couldn’t re-air a video he'd shot in Baghdad after accusations surfaced that he breached operational security in detailing enemy rocket attacks. "It wasn't so much that he was running around shouting 'look at me, I'm in combat,'" said a pentagon spokesperson. "It's that in the background of the video terrorists would be able to see how closely their rockets were coming to Halliburton assets."

“The Congressman shot the video in the company of State Department and military personnel, and was not briefed on making a spectacle of himself,” his spokesman Wes Climer said in a written statement. "Look, we got a tough primary coming up here," he told reporters. "We're just trying to get a little edge, that's all."

A Pentagon spokesman said he didn’t know who McHenry was up against, “but we routinely explain to politicians trying to make political points with trips over here what they can and can't do.”

"We thought those briefings were for civilians," Climer said. When it was pointed out that representative McHenry was a civilian, Climer disagreed. "He's a congressman," he said. "A republican congressman."

McHenry’s trip to Iraq had already been mired in controversy after his GOP political opponent, military attorney Lance Sigmon of Newton , posted a YouTube.com video of the lawmaker telling local Republicans about his unsuccessful efforts to get into the gym in the Green Zone. McHenry said he was shut out by a “two-bit security guard.”

"I'd just like to state for the record, that representative McHenry supports the troops. Even the two bit ones." Climer said.

*Luckily Osama likes Oprah better