Stuck on Spin

There can't be a worse moment for members of a personality cult than when they had constructed a whole edifice of justication around a particular remark of the Leader, and then the Leader goes and retracts the remark. It's like that moment in Animal Farm that we referred to another context recently, where Napoleon was initially against Snowball's windmill, but suddenly he was for it, causing some doubt amongst the non-porcine population of the farm. And so it is today with Dubya's (safely post-election) regrets about his "Bring them on" and "Dead or alive" remarks. [More from Dan Froomkin here].

[Dubya] I don't know if you'd call it a regret, but it certainly is a lesson that a president must be mindful of, that the words that you sometimes say -- I speak plainly sometimes, but you've got to be mindful of the consequences of the words. So put that down. I don't know if you'd call that a confession, a regret, something

So take for instance the reactionaries at the Wall Street Journal online editorial page (James Taranto's OpinionJournal), who leapt to the task of defending the original remarks:

You don't defeat an enemy by putting your sensitive, vulnerable, nurturing side on display. And a little swagger is essential to the warrior culture ... Besides, David Warren [Canadian hack] notes that there's a very good reason to want to "bring them on" in Iraq:

[Warren quote] "President Bush has also, quite consciously to my information, created a new playground for the enemy, away from Israel, and even farther away from the United States itself. By the very act of proving this lower ground, he drains terrorist resources from other swamps. This is the meaning of Mr. Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt ... What the media and U.S. Democrats affect not to grasp, is that the soldiers are now replacing targets that otherwise would be provided by defenceless civilians, both in Iraq and at large ... It is carefully hung flypaper" [end Warren quote]

Flypaper, we [WSJ] would add, that seems to have entrapped the president's domestic opponents as well as the country's foreign enemies.

So there it is -- the genesis of the flypaper theory, that was quickly elevated into core pro-war spin once the WMD wild goose chase was becoming apparent, constructed around something Dubya now wishes he hasn't said. There's that moment with flypaper when you take pity on the futile flapping of the fly and just squelch it. But in this case we wonder if the fly will maintain that he wanted to be stuck there?