Riding Off Into the Sunset
Slinking Away with His Tail Between His Legs

Crawford's village idiot ran off to a safe haven in Utah for yet another "stay the course" moment--which is pretty easy for him to say, given that neither he nor his has an ass on the firing line...

But, in what portends bad things for Vacation Man (able to fall off bicycles and go bass fishing in a single afternoon--but not face the reality of Camp Casey...), Utah is no longer Kansas anymore (link is photo-intensive for those with dial-up connections):

Oddly, Mr. Bush faced war protests in Utah, where he took 71 percent of the vote in his 2004 re-election race, making it the reddest of Republican-red states. But Salt Lake's mayor, Ross C. Anderson, a Democrat, organized a protest in a park near the V.F.W. convention, calling on people who oppose Mr. Bush's Iraq and environmental policies to gather around him.

Mr. Anderson, in an interview on CNN, called the president's policy in Iraq "just a disaster" and said that the war there - begun in a quest for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist - had "created more enemies" for the United States.

Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, the mother of a National Guardsman killed in Iraq, was at the protest, telling a Reuters reporter, "We all know that noble cause for war that Bush talks about has changed several times." Ms. Zappala is a founding member of the antiwar group Gold Star Mothers for Peace. Its most prominent member is Cindy Sheehan of California, who gained wide notice by camping outside the president's ranch with a growing coterie of war protesters until last week, when she returned home after her mother suffered a stroke.

Television images of the Salt Lake City protest showed a quiet, orderly protest. The Associated Press estimated the turnout at 400 or 500. A spokesman for Gold Star Mothers said the turnout was closer to 1,000.

There's also this notation from the Times re: Shrubya's speech:

Mr. Bush recited the latest toll of United States dead. "We have lost 1,864 members of our armed forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom," he said.

Must've taken him a long time to count that high.

No word on whether or not Cheney took him out for an ice cream treat afterwords.