… a Marine at war with a sense of humor:

Umm Qasr is essentially a void now in the daily briefings of the Iraqi disinformation minister. His last mention of Umm Qasr was a vow that it would never fall into the hands of the “pirates” (arrrrrrrgh) and “gangsters” (mama mia!) of the coalition. This is essentially true, in that the coalition is devoid of either. American and British troops did take the city, though, and are in the process of… doing nefarious things like public works projects.

There has to be as many aid workers and civil engineers running around the coalition-occupied territory of Southern Iraq as there are fighting troops now. And the last I checked, the pirates of the Caribbean were not especially concerned with the welfare of those they invaded.

And I’m short a parrot, damn it.

Or how about this tidbit?

Can we stop the postmortems already? Peter Arnett is already declaring this thing a failure on Iraqi television. And that’s a damn shame, because I live my life in constant need of approval from Peter Arnett.

Look, I can understand Pete’s need to switch over to a network with more viewership than MSNBC, but come on, I thought the journalist’s credo was “objective,” not “aid and comfort.”

The firing of Peter Arnett from multiple jobs was sweet justice indeed. Given his history, I doubt he’ll ever work as a TV journalist ever again.