Originally Posted by Guest

Are we, once again, being lead to believe the "Mission Accomplished" banner was about the ship returning. LOL, we could believe that except for W's remarks that day.

If there's one day in particular Bush could choose to rewrite, it might be May 1, 2003.

It was a sunny day off the coast of San Diego. Congress had authorized what would become the Iraq war a few months earlier, in October 2002. The invasion had begun in March 2003. On May 1, President Bush had landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot's seat of a Navy fighter jet.

President Bush is welcomed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Thursday, May 1, 2003, off the California coast. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
After landing, Bush changed out of his combat suit and stepped up to the podium, surrounded by a crowd as receptive as the one in Dallas last week.

Having marched U.S. troops through Iraq and deposed of Saddam Hussein's regime (and his statue), Bush called Operation Iraqi Freedom "a job well done."

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," Bush said, the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner hovering over him. "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

At the time, the theatrics seemed effective, in the eyes of U.S. News. Democrats were disappointed, as Ken Walsh wrote, that the photo-op went so smoothly

Instead, the speech and the banner became a symbol of the unpopular war, which would last another eight brutal years. The image came to encapsulate not just the war, but the mistakes of the Bush administration as a whole, as even Bush himself admitted at his final press conference as president.

"Clearly, putting a 'mission accomplished' on an aircraft carrier was a mistake," Bush said, when asked about his errors while in the White House. "It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently but, nevertheless, it conveyed a different message."

You can't spin this one!!!!!