Dreamland

It looks like the Bush environmental agenda -- run amok -- is busy at work in Iraq:

An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq's northern Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called "black oil," the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs next to the Tigris River and set it on fire.

The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the region, which is dotted with villages and crisscrossed by itinerant sheep herders, but also contains Iraq's great northern refinery complex at Baiji.

An Iraqi environmental engineer who has visited the dumping area described it as a kind of black swampland of oil-saturated terrain and large standing pools of oil stretching across several mountain valleys.

A black swampland of oil-saturated terrain. My god, that must sound like nirvana to the Bush White House. I can almost hear the hoots and howls:

Ha ha ha! We've created a black swampland of oil-saturated terrain! Yeehaw!

But wait, we've got to get rid of that 'black swampland' bit. That won't poll well. 'Glossy meadow,' maybe?