"Can we win?" Bush said, "I don't think you can win it."

Wow! The President of the United States says we cannot win the war on terror!

I'm speechless....

Ok, I'm not at all speechless, nor is any other Democrat in the nation right now. Amazingly the Dems aren't entirely asleep at the switch, with Edwards amongst others riffing well on this line.

Now, for some attempts at fairness. (I try to be fair & balanced... or at least fairly unbalanced which is close enough)

Here are some possible explanations for this statement:

• The you in the "you can't win it" was directed at the interviewer or someone else, or maybe the American people as a whole... unless Bush gets another four years of course. He didn't explicitly clarify that, but it could have been implicit.
• He was making a philosophical argument that this is not something one wins in a conventional means. To rid the world of terror you must rid the world of emotion and cruelty and rid man of all but the better angels of his nature. It's a really beautiful and deep idea. Although I thought his faith-based initiatives coupled with making sure that not a penny of U.S. foreign aide for developing nations goes to programs that do not have an enforce abstinence-only credo would change things. He also passed a so-called "partial-birth abortion" ban. Hasn't he already single handedly cleansed the human condition of all evil? If so, why not claim we will win it without question as long as he appoints another 3-4 Supreme Court justices of his choosing?
  
• He misheard the question. He might have though the interviewer asked if we would win Star Wars with Episode 3.
  
• He warned people not to misunderestimate him. Now he's testing Al Qaeda to see if indeed they will.
  
• Strategery (yes, I know Bush never said this, but man, that was a GREAT SNL Sketch, and Will Ferrell was in peak form)
• Lock box! (see, I'm fair sometimes)
• He needs to work fewer hours per day. See, the cuts to overtime pay were just a sly trick to reduce his drive to work extra hours by reducing his financial incentive to work longer. The overtime revision was really a cry for help!
• He has seen intelligence we have not: Al Qaeda has been secretly infiltrating pretzel factories and is planning a salty assassination.
  
• He was talking about winning it in the conventional sense ... about how this is a different kind of war and we face an unconventional enemy. (this is the actual White House reply, it's funnier than anything I can come up with)
• He's a strong and resolute leader. He does not flip flop. Any "evidence" that he ever claimed we could win this war on terror is obviously a flaw in reality or the product of the vast vast vast left wing conspiracy.
  
• You have to think about this in Bush-speak terms. In Bush-speak, "Mission Accomplished" means Quagmire Entered, so if he's saying we cannot win the war on terror, it means we not only won, but we all get prizes! (yay!)
  
• He needs more vacation time than the measly 40% he's been getting.
• That wasn't the President, that was Kodos!
• He's been reading a little too much into the book of Revelations
• Dick Cheney told him so (which raises other questions)
• He's just joshing us, the big kidder!
• He felt pity for Michael Moore, and the fact that the line "There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." will eventually get old. (yes, I found a copy of the text on the White House official site!)
• Wait a second, maybe that WAS Will Ferrell saying it!

Am I being unfair? Oh yeah. This is a stupid misstatement. I've done worse, but the fact the White House and their surrogates are trying to defend it is stupid. I don't think there's any real explanation except he misspoke. Much like the stupid misstatements that Kerry has made that right wingers repeat ad nauseum.

Though this misstatement is arguably more damaging than any other I've seen from anyone this election cycle. It could go down with "read my lips, no new taxes." Repeated enough (and it will be) it could really hurt the President. Given what mud he has slung through his campaign and through phantom campaigns, it couldn't happen to a nicer person. (quite literally)

Of course, the war will take a LONG time, and of course it's pretty stupid to call this a war. It's a struggle that will not be won by the bomb alone but also by the hearts and minds of the world. It's an important struggle that may well equal the struggle between totalitarianism in all of its forms that we faced last century (communism psuedo-communism, facism, etc) So in theory I'm sympathetic to arguments about how hard it is to win, and even some humility to replace jingoistic boasts about our invincibility. However, I don't buy that this signals a change of heart for Bush, or a forward thinking philsophical view of our struggle. I am much more likely to believe that Bush believes that we will defeat any and all enemies.

In other news, the President also claimed that a mistake we made in Iraq was we weren't prepared for the "catastrophic victory" in Iraq. On one hand, I have to give some points to the guy for FINALLY admitting any mistake of any kind. However, "catastrophic victory" isn't what lead us to send in far too few troops to secure the nation. Catastrophic victory was not what lead us to abrogate any serious planning for the post-war situation. (or at least to listen to any plans) Catastrophic victory did not lead to us not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in any serious way. In addition, if the victory was catastrophic, wouldn't that imply we shouldn't have gone to war to begin with?

Actually, never mind. The pundits inform me that he is a strong and resolute leader who will win the war on terror he claims is unwinnable. That's good enough for me.

On a last note, I wasn't able to watch the convention (was in class, getting an edumacation of sorts), but I heard about these "reporters" that the GOP hired for the feeds of the convention to provide interviews and commentary. Essentially these reporters were a scripted, wholly owned psudo-journalism arm of the GOP. Somewhere tonight Roger Ailes (Fox News' president) in crying himself to sleep asking himself "what do they have that we don't??"

(screed mode on)