On stuff we already knew

Okay, so now it's time to play a little game we like to call "Who Said It?"

Here's the quote:

Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

And now you get to figure out who said it! (See how that works with the name of the game? Kind of intuitive.)

Did you guess "ACG at Practically Harmless"? If so, you're... well, kind of right, maybe, because I'm sure that I've said that once or a dozen times. But no, that particular quote came from none other than Dick Cheney himself. 'Cept he said it back in 1994, back when logic still halfway applied, before invading Iraq became a good thing via the magical power of Karl Rove.

While we're playing the game, who said this?

“He will move back up in the polls,” says [our mystery speaker], who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush’s 30% approval rating by saying it’s heading close to “40%,” and “higher than Congress.”

Looking ahead, he adds, “Iraq will be in a better place” as the surge continues. Come the autumn, too, “we’ll see in the battle over FISA” — the wiretapping of foreign terrorists — “a fissure in the Democratic Party.” Also in the fall, “the budget fight will have been fought to our advantage,” helping the GOP restore, through a series of presidential vetoes, its brand name on spending restraint and taxes.

As for the Democrats, “They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate” by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but “I think we’ve got a very good chance to do so.”

That would be "political genius" and "brilliant mind" Karl Rove, who is packing up his shrunken baby heads and cat-o'-nine-tails for his departure from the White House at the end of the month. He says it's "to spend more time with his family," and although convential wisdom generally translates that to "I just got fired, either for my own stupidity or poltiical reasons," I think in this case it just means "the military developed a nice satellite remote that lets me control the president from the comfort of my living room."