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For Bush, It's Game Time
By George F. Will

After this winter of his discontent, the president needs spring training. He is far from midseason form, and his accumulating errors are undermining the premise of his reelection campaign, which is: Wartime demands hard choices and sacrifices, and a president who is steady, measured and believable.

Rhetorical carelessness and overreaching began before the war, when various administration officials ignored Mark Twain's warning that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning bug and lightning. It would have been much better if the president and others, speaking about Iraqi weapons, had said "we believe" rather than "we know."

After the war, in May, on Polish television, President Bush said, "We found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories." No, we did not. "So what's the difference?" said the president in December about the failure to find WMDs, because "if [Saddam Hussein] were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger." Such casualness, which would be alarming in any president, is especially so in one whose vaulting foreign policy ambitions have turned his first term into Woodrow Wilson's third term, devoted to planting democracy and "universal values" in hitherto inhospitable places....