There is a delightful movie starring Stan & Ollie called: The Perfect Day. (1929)

Stanley & Ollie have been working all day to prepare their food so that they might go on a family picnic. They enter their car with their wives, their dog and Uncle Edgar who is in a cast. The movie is hilarious.

I first saw it about noon in a frathouse a hundred years ago. I had the single worst hangover I ever experienced. But I could not stop laughing at this movie.

All I could remember was watching all these neighbors yelling "goodbye" to our friends as they attempted to leave the area in their automobile. And our friends keep yelling goodbye. The car wont start. Then Ollie experiences a flat tire. Nothing seems to go right--except the film of course.

Ultimately the car sinks into the road with scores of goodbyes. And I was in front of the TV yelling: GOODBYE, GOODBYE!!!

My take at the time was something along the lines of What About Bob. At least in the mind of Richard Dreyfus. Everybody not only wished to say goodbye. They wished our friends to be gone, finally. It not only seemed Laurel & Hardy would never leave. They will never finally leave.

http://www.youtube.com/v/27RVOkGXYd8

GOODBYE

Dick Cheney told us six long years ago that the Iraqis would greet us with flowers. They would dance in the street. They would celebrate US as we destroy the greatest tyranny in history; and eventually cheer us for bringing these poor down trodden people democracy.

Instead, almost as soon as we got there, things began going wrong. We  took away their weapons after we dismissed their police force. We threw money at the Iraqis like it was toilet tissue on All Hallows Eve.

Once we even dropped 12 billion dollars in hundred dollar bills on the streets of Bagdad. To this day we still have no receipts for that money.

There followed a civil war that we depicted as a minor conflict initiated by Al Qaeda or the Taliban or foreign terrorists or........

We lost 4,500 soldiers over there. We welcomed back home, tens of thousands of soldiers permanently maimed as a result of their service over there.

We saw, several times, the President of Iraq holding, hugging and kissing the President of Iran--a man detested by this country.

The Iraqis have wanted us to leave ever since the first day we ever got there. Laws were passed by the Iraqi government telling us to leave. Polls were telling us that 80% of the Iraqis wanted us out of there a year or two after we arrived.

The Guardian (UK) has reported that:

Iraq has declared tomorrow a national holiday and is planning festivals to mark the end of the US presence on the streets of its towns and cities, more than six years after Saddam Hussein was ousted

The much-anticipated milestone has been hailed as a return to sovereignty by Iraqi officials, who have maintained sometimes difficult relations with the US military throughout the years of occupation.

But the celebratory mood has angered some senior US officials and military commanders, who believe intensive training efforts with Iraqi forces have been forsaken, along with combat operations that have cost at least several thousand American lives since the fall of Baghdad.

The Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, fuelled US anger at the weekend by describing the withdrawal as the result of Iraq's successful bid to "repulse" the invaders. "We are on the threshold of a new phase that will bolster Iraq's sovereignty. It is a message to the world that we are now able to safeguard our security and administer our own affairs," Maliki said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/28/iraq-holiday-us-withdrawal

So we finally got our dancing in the streets. We finally witness the jubilation of Iraqis.

And that jubilation is a result of our getting out of their goddamn cities. 

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

At last, the Iraqis are experiencing a perfect day.