Most Ridiculous Moment?

I've exhaustively chronicled the White House's furious attempt to muddle the issue this week.

Yesterday, there was at least one more White House attempt to somehow convey that Bush is not simply "staying the course." Naturally, it failed.

Margaret Warner interviewed national security adviser Stephen Hadley for PBS's NewsHour.

"WARNER: 'Is the president himself more open to other ideas now than, say, six months ago?'

"HADLEY: 'Well, we would say that we've made a lot of changes all the way through. Obviously, there are some things, the Baghdad security plan which we've talked about, there was a phase one. It did not achieve all the objectives we had hoped. We moved into a phase two; further adjustments clearly need to be made.

"It's a difficult situation. The president made clear about that. We made changes in the past. It's pretty clear we're going to need to make some changes in the future. I think the president recognizes that."

In other words: No.

A Linguistic Trap

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Linguistics professor George Lakoff writes in a New York Times op-ed: "The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, he'll think of an elephant. When Richard Nixon said, 'I am not a crook' during Watergate, the nation thought of him as a crook.

"'Listen, we've never been stay the course, George,' President Bush told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News a day earlier. Saying that just reminds us of all the times he said 'stay the course.' . . .

"'Stay the course' was for years a trap for those who disagreed with the president's policies in Iraq. To disagree was weak and immoral. It meant abandoning the fight against evil. But now the president himself is caught in that trap. To keep staying the course, given obvious reality, is to get deeper into disaster in Iraq, while not staying the course is to abandon one's moral authority as a conservative. Either way, the president loses."

Andrew Greeley writes in a Chicago Sun-Times opinion column: "It would appear that two weeks before the election, President Bush may be revising the course as well as staying it. Perhaps this is the ultimate Karl Rove scam: We will stay the course until victory in Iraq, but we will set up 'milestones' that will in effect be a schedule for withdrawal. We will have our cake and eat it too. . . .

"If it works, it will be the greatest shell game in political history. The only problem with it is, while it might win another election, what will happen when the bloody killing in Iraq continues despite the milestones?"