It's Not Good New! It's Not! It's Not! It's Not!

Is the Washington Post trying to be funny today, by making itself a political cartoon lampooning the chronically negative MSM?

For President Bush, the strong turnout for Iraq's election yesterday may represent the best day since the fall of Baghdad 32 months ago because all major factions participated in the political process, according to U.S. and Middle East analysts. But the sobering reality, they added, is that the vote by itself did not resolve Iraq's lingering political disputes.

After weeks of an increasingly divisive debate at home that helped sink the president's approval rating to an all-time low, the Bush administration appeared buoyed by the throngs at the polls and the low violence. Flanked in the Oval Office by six young Iraqis, all with a purple-stained finger signifying they had voted, Bush called the election a "major milestone" on the road to democracy.

"It's the best moment since Baghdad fell . . . but it's at least 18 months late," said Henri J. Barkey, a former State Department Iraq policy planning expert now at Lehigh University. "The fall of Saddam Hussein was a moment. This is just a moment of relief."