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Given Conason's article and the occasional rightist defense among the responding letters, I think there's a further question of significant interest: where do these vague, repeated phrases come from?
Bush himself does not seem to be a calculating off-the-cuff verbalist. In accord with this, he tends to fall back on the same repertory of phrases, or close to, again and again, as Conason's quotes show.
So there's got to be someone back there inside the apparatus, concocting and assaying the phraseology. One imagines intense debate:
--"Is this a lie?"
--"No, because under some non-obvious parse, it can be assigned a metaphorical reading under which it is nearly true."
-- "OK. Start the POTUS on his training schedule."
Or so one imagines. But there literally must be something like this going on, with real people, real training sessions and so on. Who are they? When do they take place? This would seem to be an important aspect of understanding how the administration functions.
