Last Throes

"No, not the effort to drive U.S. forces America out of Iraq -- that continues unabated. I'm talking about the Bush administration's decision to stop using the words 'insurgency' and 'insurgent' to describe the rebel forces.

Tuesday, Donald Rumsfeld said that 'over the weekend' he'd had 'an epiphany' that 'this is a group of people who don't merit the word "insurgency"'.

"President Bush apparently had the same epiphany because in Wednesday's big speech on Iraq he went to great pains to rebrand the enemy as 'a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists'. Indeed, he only uttered 'insurgents' one time in the entire speech -- and even then it was when quoting a U.S. Lt. Colonel (who apparently has been too busy training Iraqi troops in Tikrit to have time for weekend vocabulary epiphanies).

"So in the middle of a whole lot of the same tired rhetoric we've heard before ('September 11', 'as Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down', 'we will never back down, we will never give in'), here came the president's latest 'Plan for Victory in Iraq': win the war on words."

National Review , meanwhile, throws down the gauntlet:

"The battle lines are being drawn with increasing clarity on Iraq. More and more Democrats will give up on their former posture of denouncing Bush's handling of the war without offering any real alternative of their own, and instead forthrightly enunciate their own favored policy: quitting. There is a kind of honor in this -- at least it is the position many of them have always believed in. But it is their shame that it has taken a dip in support for the war in the polls for them finally to be frank about it."

This is all, in my view, a long-overdue debate.

Finally, the New York Times breaks some ground on the Abramoff front:

"With a federal corruption case intensifying, prosecutors investigating Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist, are examining whether he brokered lucrative jobs for Congressional aides at powerful lobbying firms in exchange for legislative favors, people involved in the case have said...

"Investigators are said to be especially interested in how Tony C. Rudy, a former deputy chief of staff to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, and Neil G. Volz, a former chief of staff to Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, obtained lobbying positions with big firms on K Street."

This can't be good news for anyone who ever shared an elevator with Abramoff.