Back to reality shows

The New York Times says it for us:  the Petraeus and Crocker buffet of promises was nothing but "empty calories."

It was just another of the broken promises and false claims of success that we’ve heard from Mr. Bush for years, from shock and awe, to bouquets of roses, to mission accomplished and, most recently, to a major escalation that was supposed to buy Iraqi leaders time to unify their nation. We hope Congress is not fooled by the silver stars, charts and rhetoric of yesterday’s hearing. Even if the so-called surge had created breathing room, Iraq’s sectarian leaders show neither the ability nor the intent to take advantage of it.

It's the "bouquets of roses" which brings home to us how difficult it has been for most of us to get through six-plus years of Bush-Cheney.  We have been forced to live in a fantasy in which the president is a macho leader and our military are righteous by birth and our economy is the best in the world, where authoritarianism is patriotism and lying is loyalty.

If anyone ever wondered why Americans during this time became so addicted to "reality shows," it's because they have relieved us, an hour at a time, from the fiction we've been forced to inhabit by the Bush administration.  When we got off our couches and went out to vote, the people we voted for (because they were supposed to be on our side -- supposed to be realists) betrayed us.

The American people deserve more than what the general and the diplomat offered them yesterday.

For that matter, they deserve more than what was offered by Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. When protesters interrupted the hearing, Mr. Skelton ordered them removed from the room, which is understandable. But then he said that they would be prosecuted. That seemed like an unnecessarily authoritarian response to people who just wanted to be heard.