A great column from Jon Carrol (SF Chronicle)

President Bush is on the road again, this time with a new dog and pony show about Iraq and Iran. According to David Sanger of the New York Times, when the president whistle-stopped around to friendly venues in December explaining his strategy for victory, his dropping poll numbers stopped dropping -- for about a month. Then they resumed their slide down that well-known slippery slope.

(A slippery slope differs from, say, a rocky slope in that a slippery slope is a lot harder to climb back up. Not that the president seems to be in any mood to reverse course -- everyone believes him when he says he's going to "stay the course." Staying the course on a slippery slope is easy -- it's what's at the bottom of the slope that's the problem.)

"We expect the enemy will try again and they will continue to sow violence and destruction designed to stop the emergence of a free and democratic Iraq." Again, I believe him. I think "the enemy" (which may have a lot in common with "the friend" or "the acquaintance" or "the people in the village you guys bombed three years ago") will continue to slaughter people and disrupt orderly government and generally carry on in the appalling jihadist way -- which, come to think of it, is a little like the appalling American way, except that we use NIEDs (non-improvised exploding devices). So the president's vision is us killing them and them killing us until someone gets tired.

This is in contrast to Vice President Cheney's remark 10 months ago that "they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." Gosh, if they can throe that well, there's a place for them in the outfield of the Chicago Cubs.

The rest is at:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/03/17/DDGU9GJ5LN1.DTL