Bush Rhetoric Tips: "Progress" Good; "War" Bad

President Bush continues his Iraq PR campaign with more empty rhetoric...

...Progress is the buzzword at the White House as Bush headlines a campaign tied to the war's anniversary to buck up public support of the mission.

The president continues yet another series of speeches on Iraq - there have been several similar blitzes in the last year - Monday at the City Club of Cleveland. He planned to take questions about his war policy and other topics from the audience in the heavily Democratic city.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush would update Americans on his vision for Iraq - highlighting the progress being made while acknowledging that not everything has gone perfectly...

This is nothing new. He's been using the "progress" buzzword for months... since at least mid-2005 as best I can recall (I even did a search for the phrase in old blog posts and found several references). A Google search finds even more references. "Progress", as used by the President, is a completely hollow word. It means nothing and he often has little to no examples to back up this rhetoric. It's the 2006 version of "turning the corner". It's simply shorthand for 'Just bare with me folks, I know what I'm doing'.

It should be clear, however, that he has no idea what he's doing and is acting on the same misguided belief as he did when he started the war in 2003... that God himself gave this mission to him and that any bad news are lies meant to test his faith. He is supported by the other members of his administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc) for whom their neoconservative philosophy is practically a religion.

The President has also been consistently lowering expectations on what would constitute 'victory' in Iraq and even then he keeps failing to meet them. They refuse to acknowledge the problems in Iraq- Cheney claimed yesterday on 'Face The Nation' that not only is there no civil war in Iraq, but that his previous statements about us being greeted as liberators and of the insurgency being in its last throes were "basically accurate and reflect reality". They deny the statements they made before the war- President Bush said again today that they never said there was an Iraq/9-11 connection. If anyone we knew made these kind of statements, we'd refer them to a psychiatrist. And yet, we are meant to accept the President's false assertions that we are making 'progress'... whatever he defines that as.

Meanwhile, the President refuses to even utter the word 'war'. The AP reports-

President Bush marked the anniversary of the Iraq war Sunday by touting the efforts to build democracy there and avoiding any mention of the daily violence that rages three years after he ordered an invasion.

The president didn't utter the word "war."...

...Bush did not mention the insurgent attacks, the car bombs or the mounting Iraqi deaths in a two-minute statement to reporters outside the White House after returning from a weekend at Camp David. Avoiding the word "war," he called the day "the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq."...

Does this not sound like insanity to you?

This President is all talk and it's time the media started acknowledging that more.

[PS- More news from the AP: Civil war fears grip Iraq on 3rd anniversary]