It's really starting to look like Bush believes his own publicity:

President Bush asserted Friday that critics who claim the
Iraq war has made America less safe embrace "the enemy's propaganda."

Is this the Emperor's New Clothes argument or what?

"You do not create terrorism by fighting terrorism," he told a receptive military audience. "If that ever becomes the mind-set of the policymakers in Washington, it means we'll go back to the old days of waiting to be attacked — and then respond."

Ha! You don't create terrorism by fighting terrorism? What kind of nonsense assertion is that? Obviously it depends upon how you fight terrorism.

Bush's plan is to have no plan. "Stay the course," he says, which is another way of saying he's going to continue to do nothing about Iraq until the next president inherits the problem.

Stay the course = Pass the buck

"Some have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists — by fighting them in Iraq — we are making our people less secure here at home," Bush told the Reserve Officers Association. "This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them."

Yes, it does, because it's true. Before we invaded Iraq, there weren't thousands upon thousands of terrorists in Iraq plotting against Americans. Now there are.

However, there were and still are terrorists in Afghanistan, the country Bush has largely ignored, the country where 9/11 was planned, the country where al Qaeda was training its terrorists.

Bush's speech to the military group followed one he gave the day before at a GOP fundraiser in Alabama, where he accused Democrats of "obstruction and endless second-guessing" and not having the stomach to persist in Iraq.

To "persist" in Iraq is not a winning strategy. You don't win by "persisting." You don't win through "stay the course" -- especially when there is no course.

You don't win an occupation.

It's pretty obvious now that the Bush Administration plan for Iraq is to string us all along, with American soldiers and Marines dying and tens of thousands of Iraqis dying, until he can finally pass the mess onto others.

That's the Bush way. It's how he did business. It's how he does politics.

Update: The New York Times coverage offers more:

“The Democrats are using the N.I.E. to mislead the American people and justify their policy of withdrawal from Iraq,” the president said. “The American people need to know what withdrawal from Iraq would mean. By withdrawing from Iraq before the job is done, we would be doing exactly what the extremists and terrorists want.”

Mr. Bush has been honing his offensive against Democrats for weeks as his political team seeks to shift the election-year focus from a debate about him and the unpopular war to one about terrorism in general, his party’s efforts to combat it and what he describes as the opposition’s promotion of defeatism and retreat.

It's awfully easy to say for a man who has no winning strategy. Bush's plan to hold out until he can pass the buck is not acceptable to the vast majority of Americans.

It's time to sweep his rubber-stamp congress out of office.

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