Quote of the day: Is Osama maybe just "resting"? Welcome to Bushworld, where we don't have "failure," just "success that hasn't occurred yet"

"Well, I'm not sure. It's a success that hasn't occurred yet. I don't know that I view that as a failure."
--White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, pressed by CNN's Ed Henry "to admit that the administration's failure to capture Osama bin-Laden in the past five years was, well, a failure" (in the words of Al Kamen in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column today)


Mr. Kamen titles this item "Osama's Not Dead; He's Resting," in awarding Ms. Townsend the Monty Python Dead Parrot Award for 2006. He explains:

"It's always best to wait till the very end of the year before declaring the winner of this prestigious spinmeister award--given in honor of the iconic scene in which Michael Palin, as a pet-shop owner, insists that the obviously dead parrot he just sold John Cleese's character is merely napping.

"And, sure enough, the winning entry came in on Dec. 28."


AND ELSEWHERE IN THE LOOP:
"Who Might KBR Intend to Fund?"

'Twas the day after Christmas, Mr. Kamen notes, and Halliburton subsidiary KBR, the U.S. military's largest contractor in Iraq, was filing its forms with the Federal Election Commission to set up its new political action committee, KBRPAC.

So why was the company, which just agreed to pay the government $8 million to settle allegations of overbilling for work in the Balkans and which has a number of False Claims Act and congressional investigations pending, setting up its very own PAC? Most likely because it's spinning off from parent Halliburton and needs its own operation. Or it could be because of two words: Henry Waxman.