The preznit is spending a lot of time abroad lately. I'm thinking maybe Laura accidentally left the whole newspaper in the presidential potty room instead of just the funnies and he discovered his approval rating at home is threatening to drop into the twenties. The only people left supporting him are the bloodthirsty and the religiously insane. Pretty much the American version of the Usama bin Laden fan base. He didn't notice on his trip to Vietnam and Indonesia that the rest of the world likes him even less than we do. Now he's off trying to wow them in the former Soviet bloc countries, but I doubt he'll have any better luck there. Those people know a fascist when they see one.
According to this CNN story, dubya is still mostly giving the same old stay the course speeches. We can't pull out until the mission is complete. We will accept nothing less than victory. It's not a civil war. It's all al-Qaida's fault. Terra, terra, war on terra, etc. But one statement really caught my attention:

The president traced an increase in violence to the February bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad, saying: "We've been in this phase for a while."

It's not so much what the preznit said, he's just vapidly flapping his gums as usual. It's the fact that just a few paragraphs later in the same CNN story, his National Security Advisor, who's riding on the same fucking plane with him, directly contradicted that statement. Stephen Hadley said this:

"We're clearly in a new phase characterized by an increase in sectarian violence that requires us to adapt to that new phase,"

And as far as I can tell, not one reporter had the balls to call them on it and ask a followup question. Liberal media, my ass. Lapdog media is more like it. Apparently the only skill needed for White House reporters is the ability to write down what administration officials say and print it without any analysis whatsoever. Arrgh!