Reading Between The Lines

Norman Solomon re-phrases the spin to show exactly what the President really meant in his speech last week. It's not pretty:

This is a war that can go on forever.

As president, I am the world's authority on evilness and insanity.

Those who stand in the way of our ambitions are extremists.

Clinton and even Reagan were wimps compared to me.

We must support and defend the torturers who run Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Jordan.

When enemies of the United States kill in Iraq, that's evil. When the United States kills in Iraq, that's good.

Political prisoners should be grateful that the United States is enabling them to be tortured by moderate governments.

We are valiantly obsessed with ambition and legitimately unburdened by conscience, while our crimes multiply.

The United States is never to blame, and the solution involves violence from the U.S. government and its allies.

The extremists make excuses for violence. We don't need any excuse.

The people who kill without U.S. approval are irrational. The only way to stop them is to kill them.

No one has any valid reason to be angry at us. And we have the prerogative to change behavior through violence.

The Islamic ideologues don't understand that only the United States government should get to decide when innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision.

When we terrorize, that's a civilized option.

We will proceed with destroying Iraq in order to save it.

We want to manipulate the situation enough to allow U.S. corporations to buy up much of Iraq while the U.S. military continues to build permanent bases in Iraq.

We have speech writers who like to use metaphors, unencumbered by reality-based constraints.

We know bad PR when we see it. We're going through the motions of urging an end to repression by U.S. allies in the Middle East, but there's certainly no hurry -- especially when the repression is aimed at foes of our policies.

We're trying to tune up the U.S. propaganda machinery. Hopefully, more lofty rhetoric can distract from the actual results of our policies.

To hell with peace. We want to claim victory, no matter how many people die.

Here's where I get to preach at Muslims about the sanctity of life.