Dowd On Language Failures

Maureen Dowd Links Bush to O.J.: If a Civil War Fits, You Can't Acquit: "Maureen Dowd Links Bush to O.J.: If a Civil War Fits, You Can't Acquit

By E&P Staff

Published: November 24, 2006 11:35 PM ET

NEW YORK With a timely reference to the rise and fall of the O.J. Simpson tell-some book (and what she's calls the 'Thanksgiving Day Massacre' in Iraq) Maureen Dowd in her Saturday column for The New York Times suggests that President Bush go on Fox News and declare, 'IF I did it -- here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.”

Bush, she writes, 'could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.'

She also reveals that her own paper, along with other news outlets, 'have been figuring out if it’s time to break with the administration’s use of euphemisms like 'sectarian conflict.' How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?"...

Good question. I reminded of Nixon years ago explaining the difference between an invasion and an incursion.