In your opinion piece you quote Condi Rice as saying "I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas' strong showing" In testimony before the 9/11 commission I believe she made a similar statement about " anybody flying airplanes into buildings".

To paraphrase Casey Stengel,"cant anybody around this Bush Administration play this game

In this corner you have big complicated words, stylistic execution, intense analysis, intriguing comparisons, devastating prognosis. In the other oorner you have simplistic composition, stylised rhetoric, glossy pitches, popular misconceptions, and convenient scapegoats. Who's gonna win this round?

Who cares. Keep punching, Sydney.

In this corner you have big complicated words, stylistic execution, intense analysis, intriguing comparisons, devastating prognosis. In the other oorner you have simplistic composition, stylised rhetoric, glossy pitches, popular misconceptions, and convenient scapegoats. Who's gonna win this round?

Who cares. Sydney's our man!

I like the analogy with the old Soviet Union. Free market fundamentalism leads to the same place as the worst of Communist Party ideology: The system is perfect, but the people are faulty, so the people are the cause of all failure. The system is perfect, so we don't need competence, just ideological purity.

When Bush dismisses "hindsight," and especially when he says, "our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger," he's reinforcing the critics-hate-Bush message that the right wing propaganda machine continually repeats to Bush's base. When Ted Rall was on Hannity and Colmes, explaining that his cartoon was a criticism of Bush's handling of the war, Hannity said, "We know you hate Bush." A very familiar line from Fox.

This is a kind of doublespeak that Orwell didn't anticipate in his novel 1984 (I don't think -- correct me if I'm wrong). This is using code words and phrases that, as Michael Scanlon put it, resonate with the "wackos" while confusing or going over the heads of most listeners. These phrases may seem like "meaningless bromides" to you, but they are deeply meaningful and reinforcing to Bush's base. Did Brezhnev do this?