Shorter Bush: "It's 'War on Terror' damn it!"

I love the schizoid, pseudo-Newspeak, and even doublespeak (sorry for the whoring, Orwell) behavior of this administration. There's also their "deny, deny, deny" attitude towards every that comes up and calls into question their credibility as a government officials. And their desperation to promote their doctrine through cowboy-ish propaganda is blatantly evident. For example; how to phrase the President's unpopular doctrine when it comes to terrorism and war. We've heard "war on terror," which was then re-phrased to "the global struggle against violent extremism" according to his advisors and members of the military. However, Pres. Dubya Bush, recently re-re-phrased the uh, well whatever you want to call he's doing and promoting overseas, back to "the war on terror" according to this New York Times article...

GRAPEVINE, Tex., Aug. 3 - President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, "Make no mistake about it, we are at war."

In a speech here, Mr. Bush used the phrase "war on terror" no less than five times. Not once did he refer to the "global struggle against violent extremism," the wording consciously adopted by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials in recent weeks after internal deliberations about the best way to communicate how the United States views the challenge it is facing.

In recent public appearances, Mr. Rumsfeld and senior military officers have avoided formulations using the word "war," and some of Mr. Bush's top advisers have suggested that the administration wanted to jettison what had been its semiofficial wording of choice, "the global war on terror."

In an interview last week about the new wording, Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said that the conflict was "more than just a military war on terror" and that the United States needed to counter "the gloomy vision" of the extremists and "offer a positive alternative."

So this is all about making war, war, and more war, promoted by Bush, appear to be "less gloomy." Oh well brilliant. And we all know how much success we've had in Iraq, stopping terrorists from attacking, and defeating the insurgents with this kind of policy. ::rolls eyes::

But administration officials became concerned when some news reports linked the change in language to signals of a shift in policy. At the same time, Mr. Bush, by some accounts, told aides that he was not happy with the new phrasing, a change of tone from the wording he had consistently used since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

[...]"We're at war with an enemy that attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001," Mr. Bush said in his address here, to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of state legislators. "We're at war against an enemy that, since that day, has continued to kill."

In short, if you want to get people on your side and make them unquestioning about your policies, just guilt-trip about the tragic events of September 11. Way to shamelessly exploit a horrible tragedy and thousands of murdered people.

Mr. Bush made a nod to the criticism that "war on terror" was a misleading phrase in the sense that the enemy is not terrorism, but those who used it to achieve their goals. In doing so, he used the word "war," as he did at least 13 other times in his 47-minute speech, most of which was about domestic policy.

"Make no mistake about it, this is a war against people who profess an ideology, and they use terror as a means to achieve their objectives," he said.

Gen. Richard B. Myers of the Air Force, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on July 18 in an address to the National Press Club that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution."[...]

"Some ask, are we still engaged in a war on terror?" Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Let there be no mistake about it. It's a war. The president properly termed it that after Sept. 11. The only way to defend against terrorism is to go on the attack."[...]

In introducing the new language, administration officials had suggested that the change reflected an evolution in the president's thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks and had been adopted after discussions among Mr. Bush's senior advisers that began in January.

The new slogan quickly become grist for late-night comics and drew news coverage that linked it with the emergence of a broad new approach to defining and attacking the problem of Islamic extremism through diplomacy and efforts to build closer ties to moderate Muslims, as well as through military action.[...]

I do hope that the people working over at the Ministry of Tru--er uh, the Bush Administration can get their "phraseology" straighten out, because all of these schizoid changes to their propaganda are starting to confuse me....and make all of their endeavors to put a "positive look" on the war in Iraq and Bush's Texas Ranger doctrine look even more desperate.