Golly!

Shaikh Sattar Killed in Bombing / Anbar State of Emergency Shaikh Sattar Abu Risha, leader of the Council for the Salvation of al-Anbar Province, has been killed by a bomb set at the entrance to his farm near Ramadi. Sawt al-Iraq says that a state of emergency has been declared in the province as a result. Bush met with him on the recent trip to a US base in al-Anbar and he was being held up as an American success story in finding tribal allies against the Salafi Jihadis that Washington styles "al-Qaeda."

(Perhaps one might do well to wait at least four or five days about one's dead Saviours, just in case?)

But seriously, Mr. Bones, what can we say after we've said "Golly!"?

Nil nisi bonum, I trust, and the very model of a GOP/DOD Bribe-a-Tribe™ recipient seems to have died far better than he lived. I more or less took for granted that the late unlamentable would eventually end his days at Monte Carlo or Gstaad about 2047 or 2054 after spendin' Rancho Crawford's taxpayer-extracted bucks for solid decades and decades -- yet not at all! It's scarcely a lamentable termination even so, but at least it is a respectable termination, an occasion upon which one may say "Let the earth rest lightly" with a straight face. Courage is not just nothin', after all, sir, even though Rancho Crawford militantly despise it and resolutely decline to practice it! RIP. KECEKE!

As to the sequellae in (seemingly) still Petraeus-unredeemed al-’Anbár, needless to say the TwentyPercenters and the Sunnintern and the sui generis paleface fellow-traveler gentry over at Mu’ámara Junction are bound to more or less say it served SaR right: "being held up as [a GOP] success story in finding tribal allies" was sufficient death warrant in itself. And obviously this murder will "embolden" that crowd even more than ever in their perpetual snark hunk for a Unified Muqáwama and a triumphant restoration of the former Sunni Ascendancy that can alone assure the existence of any "Iraq" worthy of the name.

So then, Bones, this particular political murder out in the Big Management Party's Peaceful Freedumbia strikes me immediately as fort mauvais, a bad thing in itself and perhaps an omen of even worse things to come, for all that I have no sympathy with what the late murderee appears to have been up to.

But why don't I take two aspirins and a glass of wine and talk to you about it in the morning, sir, when I can hopefully annotate my basic "Golly!" more lucidly?