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Via CarpetBagger, your president:

"The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East. For decades, the status quo in the Middle East permitted tyranny and terror to thrive. And as we saw on September the 11th, the status quo in the Middle East led to death and destruction in the United States, and it had to change. So America is opposing the forces of terror and promoting the cause of democracy across the broader Middle East.

"This task is long, it is difficult work, but it is necessary work. When democracy spreads in the Middle East the people of that troubled region will have a better future. The terrorists will lose their safe havens and their recruits, and the United States of America will be more secure. The hard work of helping people realize the benefits of liberty is laying the foundation of peace for generations to come."

Your task? To explain what the hell he means...

Freedom is the opposite of terror? If Hamas and Hizballah win elections and yet still are terrorists, how is democracy the answer to all of life's problems?

I'm honestly not sure which is worse, today's explanation or the one he gave a few days back:

It’s an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.

For a while, American foreign policy was just, Let’s hope everything is calm — manage calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.

And so we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.

And make no mistake: They’re still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for. In the long term, to defeat this ideology — and they’re bound by an ideology — you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.

Which reminds me... That second paragraph? Isn't Bush suggesting that September 11th might in fact have been caused by resentment to US foreign policy? I'm not sure how else you can interpret that. And while I (gasp!) have to say that I agree with him on this part of this issue, that statement sounds more like Noam Chomsky or Warc Churchill than it does George Bush.

And then.... then there's this odd juxtaposition provided to us by Billmon. That's right - Rush Limbaugh is parroting bin Laden's talking points.

What the hell is wrong with these people?