Froomkin on Bush's change in message

White House Briefing -- News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration: "Newsweek's Howard Fineman suggests that with the current 'global war on terror' script bombing, White House image makers are tuning a new script in which the president reprises his role as an American hero by declaring war on faint-hearted Democrats and the unpatriotic media.

'The revamped story line is WATITH (the 'war against terrorists inside the homeland')' and Bush's 'enemies will be different: not just the terrorists themselves, but also [faint-hearted] lovers of legalistic niceties that get in the way of investigations and MSM news organizations that focus obsessively on explosions and mayhem in Iraq, even as they print or broadcast classified information and ask nasty, argumentative questions at hastily called press conferences. . . .

'It takes some chutzpah to do this rewrite,' writes Fineman.

It also takes a resistance to the facts on the ground.

As Cam Simpson writes in Chicago Tribune's Washington blog, 'Repeated suggestions by the White House and friendly commentators that the news media's selective displays of terrorist attacks in Iraq are warping American public opinion' are belied by the U.S. State Department's own recent Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Iraq ."