For freakin cryin out loud, your mother called, she's dyin here, take off your shoes and clean that place up. She doesn't want everyone thinkin you were born in a barn. Are the bidets gold plated too?

Now that is a beautiful, beautiful sight.

"Baghdad is safe in American's hands", the Ministry of Information said.

Picture of the year.

Caption is...

"Pardon me, but would anyone have any Grey Poupon? I'm mean French's Yel... ahhh... ketchup. Anyone have any freaking ketchup!"

God, I hope that's somewhere in Paris.

Aren't these the coalition troops who aren't anywhere near Baghdad? Aren't these the guys trapped and committing suicide on the walls of the city? Aren't these the guys who ran in disgrace from the glorious Iraqi shepards who have retaken the airport?

Okay, with due respect for those who feel differently, with appreciation for witty comments to the contrary, and with no desire to throw cold water on the party, I'm a little off-put by this photo.

This from another mama who's dyin' here: maybe this just brings back shades of the damned Yankees stomping through Tara, but I do not see that this photo will do the Coalition cause any good, and can potentially do it harm.

Wonder if has occurred to anyone that the palace is no longer Saddam's, nor will it be he who scrubs the boot stains from the carpet; the palace now belongs, or ought to, to the people whom we are supposedly there to liberate. I recognize that the soldiers have gone through some hard weeks to arrive at the palace, but the people who live in that country have paid for that splendor with years of blood, sweat, tears, and lives. Surely it is theirs.

Think museum; think library, university, maternity hospital, art gallery; think of this place becoming a home for orphans, or for people mentally or physically broken by the oppression or the war; think of that building housing a hushed memorial to the dead.

I'm confident that the smashed crockery isn't Fiestaware or Corelle, and I picture a curator or art historian recognizing the fragments, and mourning the broken beauty. Surely these people have had enough of grief. Step lightly, and do not linger. That country, if it is to be one, will need its treasures now more than ever.

IMHO

Dave? Dave Bowman? Is that really you?

These dudes don't seem much worried about the Iraqi "noose."

Fraternity house of Sigma Delta Pow.

"Did you see the eyes of the butler when I asked if Saddam was home?"

Here's the real news caption for today's photo of the day.

While all those are fitting uses for the palace, and I prefer tourism/hotel, why do I get the feeling the UN will grab it first?

Talk about deja vu. In 1945 members of the 82nd Airborne Division took a similar picture at Hitler's Berghof in Austria. Sic semper tyranus. May there always be the heel of a GI's boot on the neck of the world's Saddams.

Good Lord, Dave, you're a freakin' genius! From today's WSJ Best of the Web:

The Omaha World-Herald reports that Lt. Col. Mike Presnell of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division, called his mother from Saddam Hussein's palace:

"He told me that he was going to wash his hair and brush his teeth in Saddam's private bathroom," Gloria Presnell said. "The only thing I could say to him was, 'I hope you use your own toothbrush.' "

There is a sketch in Malcolm Atkin and Wayne Laughlins’ “Gloucester and the Civil War, A City Under Siege” in 1643 which illustrates just such a scene in a captured manor house.

Servicemen of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division make themselves comfortable in the living room of one of Saddam Hussein's downtown Baghdad palaces as they watch Iraqi Information Minister Sahaf on Iraqi TV state unabashedly at a press conference that "the mercenaries" are nowhere within the vicinity of Baghdad, and denouncing statements to the contrary as the lies and propaganda of western media.

WHERE IS THE PHOTO?...

Displays just fine to me...