On Sunday, it will be eight years since George Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and proudly declared “Mission Accomplished.” Bush – to put it in the nicest way possible – was being an idiot, because the Iraq war continues to rage on, 4,000 U.S. casualties (not to mention thousands of Iraqi deaths) later.

But Bush wasn’t the only one to join in the stupidity. The media was quick to jump on the bandwagon too. On the Huffington Post today, Greg Mitchell, a contributor to The Nation, explains how virtually every major media outlet jumped at the chance to announce that the Iraq war was over, and that the United States prevailed.

There was Chris Matthews, who got weird with this quote:

Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple.

Then Brian Williams told us all how “beautiful” the event was and USA Today ran a column titled “Relax, Celebrate Victory.” But perhaps no reaction was as ridiculous as the Op-Ed by Maureen Dowd, who took Top Gun references to an all time high:

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The Texas Tribune, a new Texas-based non-profit journalism Web site, will launch tomorrow — one year before the state’s 2010 general election, which includes the gubernatorial race, among others. There has been a lot of talk about the project since longtime Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith left his day job to launch the Tribune, and even though it will cover only Texas political and policy news, we here at FishbowlNY are fascinated by the prospect of non-profit journalism no matter where its based.

The project is was founded by Texas-based venture capitalist John Thornton. Smith, who believed in Thornton’s vision from the beginning, was helping to look for a suitable editor-in-chief for the site before realizing that he would make the perfect leader. “It was sort of like Dick Cheney helping George Bush find a vice president,” Smith said. The team went on to hire a staff of eleven reporters, plucked from the top echelons of Texas’ political journalism world.

“We hired the best reporters away from for-profit journalism in Texas,” Smith said. “We put together our fantasy football list, and we got everybody we wanted.”

The Texas Tribune (www.texastribune.org) will be unlike any other non-profit journalism organization. In addition to traditional news reporting, there will be columns, blogs aggregating content from other news sources, original audio and original video content, all available for free for newspapers, radio and television stations to use. There will also be 80 gigabytes of public information, like data about Texas’ elected officials, that the Tribune assembled into databases for the public to access. “I’m kind of amazed that in just a couple of months we’ve been able to build this with a relatively small staff,” Smith said.

As he prepared to reveal The Texas Tribune to the world, Smith took a minute to talk to FBNY about his reason for leaving Texas Monthly to start the new project, how he’s worked to fund it and what the reaction from the Texas journalism community has been so far.

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Evan Smith, the president and editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly said today that he will be stepping down next month in order to take a job as founding CEO of the Texas Tribune, a non-profit news Web site that will launch later this year.

Smith joined the Texas magazine in 1992 as a senior editor, and moved his way up to deputy editor the next year. He took over as editor in 2000, and was promoted to his current position last September. In a letter to Texas Monthly staffers today, Smith recounted some of the editorial highlights of his tenure at the magazine: “two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in the last six years and fourteen more nominations over the last nine; the most City and Regional Magazine Association awards during that period of any member publication.”

Now Smith is moving on to the Tribune, which likens itself to ProPublica. The new venture will publish non-partisan investigative journalism online and host events.

“It’s no secret that I’ve been consulting with my friend of fifteen years, the venture capitalist John Thornton, on a project very close to his heart: a nonprofit, nonpartisan public media organization whose mission is to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide interest,” Smith said to his colleagues. “As John has been telling anyone who will listen, the Texas Tribune will publish original news reporting online (much like ProPublica) and put on conferences, conversation series, and other on-the-record, open-to-the-public events (much like the Aspen Institute). For nearly a year I’ve been helping John refine his concept for the Trib, and I’ve suggested various people he might hire. At some point along the way, like Dick Cheney leading the search for George Bush‘s vice president and concluding that he was the one he was looking for, I came to believe that perhaps I should join John in a more formal capacity, and he came to believe it too.”

However, Smith said he will continue to consult with Texas Monthly and host the weekly half-hour interview show, “Texas Monthly Talks,” as editor emeritus, “for the foreseeable future.”

“So you won’t get rid of me that easily,” he told his staff.

Smith will be replaced by Elynn Russell, a longtime Texas Monthly vet who will be the first woman to lead the magazine, minOnline reported.

It’s been 24 hours since The New Yorker‘s Barack Obama “Politics of Fear” cover hit newsstands, which means the print world has had time to weigh in. Also, FBNY readers!: 55% percent of the couple of hundred of you who voted found it more offensive than not, which may mirror the response The New Yorker got from its own readers. Says WWD: “readers have sent in a flood of e-mails weighted heavily toward angry complaint, save for a few who praise the cover” leading some inside the Conde halls to worry there may be some long-term advertising fallout as a result. Meanwhile, editor David Remnick spent the better part of yesterday defending the cover against what Jack Shafer refers to as the “alleged umbrage umbrage of the chattering classes.

Overall, the general concern seems to be that outside the presumably sophisticated readership of The New Yorker the unwashed masses won’t get the joke and perhaps use the image to their own evil ends. Which, after some consideration, is maybe a valid point only in so far as one wonders whether the satire factor of this image is too dependent on the fact that it’s running on the cover of The New Yorker, i.e. “The New Yorker” blazoned across the top of the image is actually the caption it requires to serve as satire, meaning one has to understand what The New Yorker represents to get the joke. (Over at the LAT Andrew Malcolm expressed concern over the lack of caption). Or maybe, as the NYT suggests, it’s just that Obama isn’t funny.

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So yeah, this week’s New Yorker cover. Everyone is shocked! shocked! Or at least everyone who works in a Presidential campaign. Obama (who recently approved Bush’s Constitutionally questionable warrantless wiretapping bill) thinks it’s “tasteless and offensive.” The McCain camp concurs. Totally understandable, since as we all know satire (part of that whole “freedom of speech” deal) is supposed to be in good taste. The conclusion here apparently being that Americans are too stupid to differentiate between satire and slander, and/or Obama supporters too thin-skinned to appreciate the humor (we happen to disagree on both counts, by the way).

One wonders if a similar cover of Hillary Clinton would have elicited such a response, or how about one of Hillary and Obama in bed together, or one of George Bush in an apron, or maybe a foreign head of state being propositioned in a men’s bathroom a la Larry Craig, or the entire Oval Office swimming in post-Katrina waters for that matter, or sailors kissing? Considering these are all subjects depicted on previous Barry Blitt New Yorker covers the answer would have to be no. Take a look for yourself after the jump.

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MTV’s new comedy troupe Human Giant, the network’s latest attempt at programming something other than a Laguna Beach spin-off, has put together something called Lil’ 9/11, a mock film about the September 11th attacks featuring children playing the roles of George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden.

The trailer [above] includes the reenactment of the now-infamous scene at Emma T. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota when Bush first learned of the attacks. Another scene shows (Lil’) Bush searching — and finding — Osama in a cave.

To be sure, there’s something unseemly about watching 6-year-olds reenact 9/11. But like any great comedy, Lil’ 9/11 is walking the tender line between hilarity and indecency.

We report. You decide.

Perhaps George Bush will finally be able to “correct” that approval rating

First they wanted their own Daily Show. Now it appears Fox News and its liberal-media-correcting followers are getting their own Wikipedia, too.

From Conservapedia’s mission statement:

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian “C.E.” instead of “A.D.”, which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.

The site was launched in November by Andy Schlafly, attorney and son of the prominent conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, and 58 students at a home school in New Jersey. (Seriously.) Only now, thanks to some mentions on science blogs and Wonkette, it seems to be getting some traction.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, by the way, supports Conservapedia: “Free culture knows no bounds … We welcome the reuse of our work to build variants. That’s directly in line with our mission.”