Success Metrics that my High School never subscribed to

My father once set up a shooting range on a girlfriend's farm. I learned many things at that shooting range: treat every weapon as if it is loaded (a side note, if conservatives treated gun control like they treat abstinence, they would think teaching me how to be safe with a gun would only lead to violence); that reaslistically the shots Lee Harvey Oswald was reported to make were not difficult to pull off (except for that trick of making the bullet turn seventeen which-ways after it's left the barrel); and that guns, even the puny air guns we had, are pretty cool (except for that whole death and destruction implication). But the most important lesson I learned was this: never say what you're aiming at before you take your shot.

Our leaders could stand to learn this lesson. They could have been vague, saying, "Saddam is a bad man. We stand against bad men. We want to be better than bad." Instead, they concocted/discovered/group-thought this rationale of weapons of mass destruction. They planted in our heads dreams of sugar plums and Iraqis dancing besides our M1A2 Abrams rolling through Baghdad (but not for long: they had a democracy to set up, and quickly!) The end result being a near-quagmire. But we all know this.

The news, as I see it, is a report I heard yesterday on NPR (I love NPR). It was discussing how we were winning, because there were now fewer insurgency attacks. Ah, that's what I wanted to hear. Uncle Sam was winning the war, through a combination of Hearts and Minds turning to our side and, frankly, the inevitable attrition that must plague any suicide bombing squadron. That sort of optimisim (September 10th mentality, I guess it must be called) was apparently too much to ask for. The joyous news was that attacks were down to 30 or 40 a day, from the 130 or so that we were coming under in the run-up to the election.

Oh what a world we live in, when we define our goals not as universal acclaim, or universal acquaintanceship-but-maybe-you-don't-get-invited-to-strictly-every-party-on-Friday-night or even not having anybody who wants to kill us. No, now the Gold Standard for American acceptance is halving the number of people shooting at you.

Heh, by that metric, I'm even popular.