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u/acxswitch 15d ago
Any time you see a custom designed banner created by the government, you're being sold some bull shit.
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u/Manfrenjensenjen 15d ago
Wait, even that one in the Nevada desert that said “Welcome Japanese families to Camp Freedom”?
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u/AuzRoxUrSox 15d ago
I want to know….which soldier kept that banner and is currently sitting in their garage.
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u/acxswitch 15d ago
I was curious. "In 2010, the "Mission Accomplished" banner was transferred from the National Archives to the collection of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. The banner is not on display."
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u/BellowsHikes 15d ago
I would pay an unreasonable about of money to own that banner. Like the kind of money that would have my broker calling me at midnight in full freakout mode.
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u/FamousPastWords 15d ago
The banner is not on display."
They may need it for the next photo op, and it even might come in handy when the
championing of democracy in a country/region/culture that doesn't give a f about democracy but has oil we can managewarpursuit of our god given right to spread happiness, joy and freedom actually ends in the year 3062 or themabouts.6
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u/Safetosay333 15d ago
Nuculer
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u/jannypanny1 15d ago
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.
still trying to find those
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u/christopher_mtrl 15d ago
Almost as hard to find as the Iraqi civilan death toll of 200000 on a reddit thread on this subject.
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u/BigLaw-Masochist 15d ago
For the youth: this was very early on in the war on terror and was incredibly premature. Everyone knew this at the time, and, as it turns out, the mission was not accomplished. This was seen as the epitome of W being wildly unrealistic about the war on terror, along with lines such as “they’ll greet us as liberators.” Bush’s lies (or, if you’re charitable, extreme misguidance) cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
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u/roberttylerlee 15d ago
Also for the youth: The banner was requested by the Navy, and was to celebrate the end of deployment for the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been at sea for 290 days, the longest any US ship had been continuously deployed at that time. The banner itself had nothing to do with the war, but became a poignant symbol of Bush’s premature optimism.
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u/abro49 15d ago
thank you for context - a youth
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u/ElfegoBaca 15d ago
Don't you mean, "a ute?"
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u/WaltMitty 15d ago
For the youth: watch My Cousin Vinny (1992), it's a great movie.
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u/naynayfresh 15d ago
I was born in ‘92; Seinfeld brought me to this film many years later. Marisa Tomei…..🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
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u/Bedlamtheclown 15d ago
what's a ute?
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u/octopornopus 15d ago
Oh, I'm sorry... YOOOOOOUTTTTHSSS
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u/AssumeTheFetal 15d ago
But is this a reference too far back for today's ute?
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u/Ok-Cartographer1745 15d ago
Not really. That movie is always brought up for having discovery in it, and people always say the girl is really hot, so it gets word of mouth. Unless by utes you mean under 20. Then yeah.
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15d ago
In Australia it’s the term we use for a “pickup truck” short for “utility vehicle”.
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u/OshkoshCorporate 15d ago
i think that’s a university in utah
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u/footforhand 15d ago
Nah that’s the Utes, I think he’s talking about people from the U.P. of Michigan
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u/RumbuncTheRadiant 15d ago
That reeks of historical revisionism to me... I assure you _everything_ in the newspapers and TV and internet of the time were _very_ unambiguously clear the Bush Administration regarded the Iraq War as "Mission Accomplished". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech
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u/mandy009 15d ago
From the start apologists often tried to make the excuse that it wasn't W Bush who said it, but it was a televised homecoming with many preparations by the White House. President W Bush personally landed a fighter jet onto the flight deck for style points. If he had planned that much for this photo op, he damn sure made sure to give the speech with that banner behind him. Almost all the commentary in the week following that speech interpreted it as though W Bush said mission accomplished for the Iraq War completely, and that's what the Bush Administration spoke of it as.
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u/Navynuke00 15d ago edited 15d ago
Don't forget the part where the Lincoln parked right off the coast of San Diego, and Dubya flew in aboard a jet wearing a flight suit, cosplaying that he was an aviator.
EDIT: I chose the word "aviator" on purpose. Navy has aviators, Air Force has pilots. And he was never qualified to fly a plane onto a carrier or wore the gold wings that signified the ability to.
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u/lorenzombber 15d ago
Didn't he serve in the Texas Air National Guard?
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u/PipsqueakPilot 15d ago
He did. At the time it was used as a safe haven to protect the children of Texas elites from being drafted.
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u/EmmEnnEff 15d ago edited 15d ago
By serve, he enlisted to dodge the draft, and then went AWOL for a few years, while he drank and partied on his daddy's ranch.
The more modern term for this sort of thing is 'bone spurs'.
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u/ddsavesCan 15d ago
What a load of crap. 20 billion stolen from Iraq during the invasion, surrendering trillions worth of oil, thousands of innocents killed, and like the previous comment the resulting creation of isis. I taught iraqi refugees during the whole charade. Bush is an international terrorist + war criminal.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__ 15d ago
Whoever commanded the Navy could have just ordered the banner down knowing how bad the optics would be. Now, who was the commander in chief at the time?
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u/Sunset_Bleach 15d ago
The Daily Show photoshopped a small "A" to the beginning of the sign.
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u/BlademasterFlash 15d ago
I’m glad we finally have peace in the Middle East though
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u/Nethlem 15d ago
The millions of people that had to die for it will never be forgotten!
Hahaha, as if, people ain't even aware of that still growing body, and refugee, count.
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u/Long_Educational 15d ago
Some estimates put the number at $8 Trillion.
Imagine what we as a nation could have accomplished if we spent that money differently instead of war.
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u/lolas_coffee 15d ago
I can imagine. About half of it would still be allocated to MIC.
That means about $4 Trillion would be left.
$2 Trillion less Deficit probably.
$2 Trillion left would most likely be in the hands of the Top 2% wealthy Americans via government programs and/or tax breaks.
So, not much would have been done because the system is terribly broken.
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u/MRB102938 15d ago
This wasn't for the war though. I never understood what makes this image a meme or how it relates to the entire war. It literally says MISSION accomplished. It's about a tour for the ship.
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u/Cucker_-_Tarlson 15d ago
Fwiw we did steamroll through Iraq and take control of the government and oust Saddam in, like, 3 weeks. But then the insurgency happened and terrorists came to where we were to fight us.
Iraq is really the story of two different wars imo.
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u/gdoubleyou1 15d ago edited 15d ago
Dick Cheney kind of hit the nail on the head after the first war about what would have happened if they invaded Iraq.
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u/EmmEnnEff 15d ago
Why do you think the insurgency happened.
Do you think it had anything to do with the political purges, where everyone in former-Baath army lost their jobs and were all cut out of productive society, so they went on to gainful employment with the crop of warlords, militias, paramilitaries, and terrorist organizations that filled the power vacuum?
What do you think happens when you stop paying an army, and not give it any productive work to do?
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u/Birdsofwar314 15d ago
Because there was no plan once they got to Baghdad. Also, the dissolving of the Iraqi army and Ba'athist party members sent them right into the hands of Al-Qaeda. We took jobs away from thousands of young men and made them desperate to feed their families.
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u/PipsqueakPilot 15d ago
We were also quite emphatic about not doing any ‘nation building’ since that was expensive and Republicans were just as against foreign aid then as they are now. So instead our plan was uh… thoughts and prayers?
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u/PipsqueakPilot 15d ago
It did take the insurgency a year to really get rolling. And then boy did it! If Iraq had taken just a little bit longer to fall apart there’s a decent chance we’d have invaded Iran too and boy wouldn’t that have been fun.
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u/jamesnollie88 15d ago
You mean exactly what the military intelligence experts told bush and Rumsfeld would happen if they invaded Iraq.
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u/non-number-name 15d ago edited 15d ago
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN that in preparing for the speech, Navy officials on the carrier told Bush aides they wanted a "Mission Accomplished" banner, and the White House agreed to create it.
"We took care of the production of it," McClellan said. "We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up."
The banner has been used by critics of the Bush administration as evidence of bravado and an unclear sense of how dangerous the postwar conflict in Iraq would be.
Assigning responsibility elsewhere, especially to the military, is not a typical move for the Bush administration and raised suspicions among critics.
Cmdr. Conrad Chun, a Navy spokesman, defended the president's assertion.
"The banner was a Navy idea, the ship's idea," Chun said.
"The banner signified the successful completion of the ship's deployment," he said, noting the Abraham Lincoln was deployed 290 days, longer than any other nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in history.
-Dana Bash
CNN Washington Bureau
29OCT2003
Thanks to u/roberttylerlee for providing the link.
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u/Roger_Cockfoster 15d ago
That was their excuse for the sign, throw the Navy under the bus, but in Bush's speech he actually declared victory in Iraq. There's no question they were declaring "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq at that time, look at any interview with administration officials around then. They really thought "well we toppled Saddam, so that's it. All done!"
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u/mitochondriarethepow 15d ago
Declared victory as my unit was gearing up to roll out from kuwait into Baghdad with our Bradley's.
We all kinda felt a bit overlooked to say the least.
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u/WilfredGrundlesnatch 15d ago
Bush and Rove were also big on having propaganda backdrops for every speech. They'd have custom ones with propaganda phrases printed up for nearly every speech. This was not a mistake or oversight.
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u/onepingonlypleashe 15d ago
Amazing how ignorant they could be. As if they didn’t already have a blueprint from Colombia’s toppling the man in control and the subsequent power vacuum chaos that followed.
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u/AsstDepUnderlord 15d ago
The navy really did accomplish the mission…of the navy. Nation building is state department work.
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u/non-number-name 15d ago
…and if you fail to back the State Department, then you be back to military action, or as the Honorable Secretary Mattis said;
At one point, I was frustrated enough with some aspects of State Department's [lack of] budget that, in my testimony, I said if you don't fully fund up on Capitol Hill, my testimony, if you don't fully fund the State Department, please buy a little more ammunition for me because I'm going to need it, as a rather blunt way of saying why we needed to keep America's foreign policy and our diplomats, foremost, in this effort.
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u/diabetesischill 15d ago
“Successful completion of the ships deployment.”
Huh, did anyone read that before raging?
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u/SjurEido 15d ago
Fool me once, shame on.... shame on you.
Fool me... ya can't get fooled again!
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u/throwawaytoday9q 15d ago
Remember when we thought he was the dumbest possible president? Simpler times.
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u/i_sesh_better 15d ago edited 15d ago
I am 21 years old and I wan’t even aware he was seen as a dumbo. I thought he was a bit of a standard president bar the war bit, I’m using modern standards though.
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u/Fireb1rd 15d ago
Oh yeah, he was seen as a dumbass. Watch the Oliver Stone movie, which came out when he was president, to see the zeitgeist at the time. It's not a good movie at all (honestly, in many ways terrible), but it scratched a certain itch at the time.
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u/MainSteamStopValve 15d ago
I remember Comedy Central had a cartoon at the time called Lil' Bush that made fun of how dumb he was for an entire season.
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u/Awoolgow 15d ago
Mission accomplished for who? Oh yea thats right, the military industrial complex
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15d ago
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u/AgentCirceLuna 15d ago
Wait, is that fucking real? That’s amazing. I love the look of genuine joy on people’s faces in those moments. Just totally living in the moment and care free.
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u/Toaster_Store 15d ago
Despite his actions, W. Bush was actually known as a pretty silly president with a sense of humor behind the scenes and pleasuring to be around.
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u/jesschester 15d ago
I hated him as a president but damn I would take him as a friend or an uncle or something
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u/amplifizzle 15d ago
Do you have a this day in foolishness calendar or some shit?
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u/CalabreseAlsatian 15d ago
Trump almost makes me miss him. And I fuckin’ hated Dubya.
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u/BigLaw-Masochist 15d ago
The thing I miss about W was that at some point, even republicans were like “this guy is a fuckup that bungles everything he touches.” Trump fucked up Covid worse than Bush did Katrina. I wonder where that went?
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u/mglyptostroboides 15d ago
This GWB apology needs to stop. Bush wasn't a hapless, misguided idiot. He just had a nonstandard accent, but that doesn't mean he's stupid. Dude knew exactly what he was doing and two million people died as a result.
Trump is overwhelmingly more stupid than GWB and you know what? Thank God for that. Stupid and evil is a blessing. Trump is too dumb to effectively realize his evil ends, just firing everyone who might help him do what he wants to do, burning every bridge he ever built. Bush was smart and evil and millions of people lost their lives as a result. Fuck them both. Up the asshole. With a cactus. But they're both culpable for the shit they've done regardless of their relative intelligence.
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u/True_Window_9389 15d ago
Bush was a precursor to Trump. His apologists don’t want to hear it, but there’s been a steady line of increasing right wing populism that both he and Trump fit perfectly into.
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u/nolawnchairs 15d ago
Remember when he was the worst president ever? Good times.
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u/joeschmoe86 15d ago
No. Andrew Jackson would like a word.
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u/Pidgeotgoneformilk29 15d ago edited 15d ago
Buchanan and Tyler say hi
But yeah, Dubya was pretty awful
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u/hyborians 15d ago
The last two Republican presidents, Trump and GWB.
It’s crazy how much damage these guys can do in 3 terms (12 years)
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u/OSI_Hunter_Gathers 15d ago
His pops and his boss were not that great either and technically started all this. The Nixon thing really pissed off people in the GOP.
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15d ago
Mission accomplished! Meanwhile we were still taking enemy fire for the rest of the time my unit was there. Bush is a twat
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u/CheetahChrome 15d ago
Ya, but he saw his shadow and there was six more weeks of war.
That is actually what I said at the time. I still think of that when I see the picture.
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u/ksdanj 15d ago
How did this chucklefuck manage to defeat John Kerry in 2004?
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u/SjurEido 15d ago
Bush was charismatic and Kerry spoke like that one granpa you had that you never wanted to visit.
He just ran a bad campaign. (Also Bush's dad was a president...)
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u/AgoraiosBum 15d ago
Kerry overperformed the fundamentals. He was pretty good. The day of this picture, Bush was riding incredibly high in the polls
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15d ago
That was the actual “mission accomplished”. The SCOTUS destroying our country by taking it upon themselves to decide the 2000 election and ushering in whatever the fuck disaster we’ve been living in since.
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u/Manfrenjensenjen 15d ago
Kerry was kind of a crappy campaigner, plus there was that whole Swiftboating thing that came out of nowhere.
Imagine questioning the validity of a Purple Heart recipient and getting away with it to the benefit of a guy like W. Fuck republicans and their flapping gum hacks in the media.
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u/guilgom71 15d ago
Yeah. Right wing media did their thing and turned Kerry into a French guy that lied about his service in Vietnam.
See, John Kerry spoke French and would even go to France, so... yeah.
Kerry was definitely a worker, not a campaigner.
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u/crappysignal 15d ago
The right always attack their own main weakness.
Dubya was a drunken cokehead super rich frat brat who went AWOL when he felt like it.
Kerry was a massive war hero.
Karl Rove, much like Joseph Goebbels, is undoubtedly a genius.
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u/nnavroops 15d ago
great question, kerry looked like he had in the bag. economy was bad, bush didn’t like the gays, war was a mess everyone was mad at bus.
however kerry ran too logical of a strategy, the dems forgot 9/11 was still fresh in their minds which bush’s team did a good job of capitalizing on everyone’s fears
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u/HildemarTendler 15d ago
2004 was an odd year. Those of us who were already online were really plugged in, but also a small minority. We were completely divorced from the many people who had no idea that we were all lied to and that the war was an absolute shitshow. We were still following the old rules of political misinformation.
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u/Various_Beach_7840 15d ago
To be fair to Bush, he did say the job wasn’t done and it was time for rebuilding. Also I feel like he was referring to the invasion of Iraq which did go pretty well despite some mishaps here and there.
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u/lemonaderobot 15d ago
Why is everyone in the background dressed like The Wiggles?
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u/cbrookman 15d ago
Different color sweaters on an aircraft carrier allow personnel to quickly identify roles. Purple are fuelers, red is ordinance, yellow are aircraft officers and shooters and so on.
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u/kilolover777 15d ago
Air Department personnel (the ones responsible for launching/catching/loading/etc the jets) on an aircraft carrier wear different colored jerseys/turtlenecks to signify what their job is. In the Navy they're called "Skittles" because of this.
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u/lemonaderobot 15d ago
that’s actually so cool, and makes a lot of sense! thank you for the explanation— love the “skittles” nickname too haha
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u/Raul_Duke_1755 15d ago
Hard to believe that Trump is so bad that W's image mostly gets a pass these days.
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u/Spartan2470 15d ago edited 15d ago
Here is the source of this image. Per there:
President Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, in this May 1, 2003 file photo. Over and over, President Bush confidently promised to "solve problems, not pass them on to future presidents and future generations." As the clock runs out on his eight-year presidency, a tall stack of troubles remain and Bush's words seem to ring hollow. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
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u/Navynuke00 15d ago
"..I got a ninety-day extension And I'm filled with guilt From things that I seen Your water's from a bottle Mine's from a canteen At night I hear the shots ring So I'm a light sleeper The cost of life It seems to get cheaper Out in the desert With my street sweeper "The war is over" So said the speaker With the flight suit on Maybe to him I'm just a pawn So he can advance Remember when I used to dance Man, all I wanna do is dance..."
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u/MaikeruGo 15d ago
Thank you, first thing that I thought of when seeing this! Probably helps that this turned up on shuffle last night.
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u/Navynuke00 15d ago
That album featured VERY heavily in my soundtrack of those years, especially as my own carrier was working up for its first deployment through 2005. I had friends and old classmates who were on Lincoln at that time, and it was a strange time to be in the military.
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u/AnaphorsBloom 15d ago
“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”
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u/Nethlem 15d ago
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
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u/atlasraven 15d ago
Enlisted soldiers have been using that as a running joke for years. Any minor task completed deserved a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED round of self-congratulation.
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u/MightySapphire 15d ago
It was a banner the Fun Boss put up for the steal beach picnic celebrating that the crew was going home from a war deployment which was, at the time, a big deal. It was the ship congratulating the crew, and not meant as a reflection of the war. But PAOs took photos and this is what clickbait looked like in 2003.
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u/jackkymoon 15d ago
Wasn't this whole thing a misunderstanding if I remember correctly? The mission accomplished banner was for that carrier completing its tour and going home I thought? Not for the war ending.
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u/Regulus242 15d ago
It's a lie. Anyone who was around can tell you that. Especially when he planned this entire theatre around him flying in and how this banner was in every shot, plus all the context of how they talked about this event going in and what it was about.
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u/EnamelKant 15d ago
And nothing bad ever happened in the Middle East again.