Quack!

For instance, "We're making progress" really means that he's working on it.

And "I appreciate that question," which usually comes immediately after a complex or tricky question, means he needs a second to collect his thoughts.

Uncompromising

Dick Polman writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that "despite a Senate deal [last week] that seemed - at first glance, anyway - to be a victory for the chamber's Democratic minority . . . Bush seems poised to get what he wants - to accentuate the court's rightward tilt, potentially to reshape the bench as no president has done since Franklin D. Roosevelt."

Carl M. Cannon, White House correspondent for National Journal, writes in The Washington Post's Outlook section that there are "plenty of reasons to believe" that Bush will simply pay the judicial compromise no heed.

"For starters, the White House is not a party to this deal, and White House support for it has been lukewarm, even noncommittal. That's significant because Bush doesn't appear to fear a showdown."

Jim VandeHei writes in The Washington Post that the compromise shouldn't obscure this fact: "Republicans have already changed how the business of government gets done, in ways both profound and lasting. . . .

"The common theme is to consolidate influence in a small circle of Republicans and to marginalize dissenting voices that would try to impede a conservative agenda. . . .

"At the White House, Bush has tightened the reins on Cabinet members, centralizing the most important decisions among a tight group of West Wing loyalists. With the strong encouragement of Vice President Cheney, he has also moved to expand the amount of executive branch information that can be legally shielded from Congress, the courts and the public."

Terror Shift

Susan B. Glasser writes in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration has launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and kill al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001, and toward what a senior official called a broader 'strategy against violent extremism.'

"The shift is meant to recognize the transformation of al Qaeda over the past three years into a far more amorphous, diffuse and difficult-to-target organization than the group that struck the United States in 2001. But critics say the policy review comes only after months of delay and lost opportunities while the administration left key counterterrorism jobs unfilled and argued internally over how best to confront the rapid spread of the pro-al Qaeda global Islamic jihad."

President Bush's top adviser on terrorism, Frances Fragos Townsend, "just hired a deputy last week, Treasury official Juan Carlos Zarate, to take on the terrorism portfolio at the NSC; Townsend had been doing that as well as serving as the president's top homeland security aide for the past year. . . .

" 'They recognize there's been a vacuum of leadership,' said a former top counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. 'There has been a dearth of senior leadership directing this day to day. No one knows who's running this on a day-to-day basis.' "