Trying to keep up

While I'm dropping in on the news regularly the last few days, it seems there are so many conflicting reports coming out right now, so many rapidly developing events with Ahmed Chalabi, former main inspiration for the Iraqi Regime Change, that I'm tempted to step back and see how things settle in a few days. Perhaps all of my questions will be answered in this by now near-legendary speech that Bush is giving tomorrow at the Army War College in Pennsylvania. I say near-legendary because I think since Wednesday I've read it as a daily headline in every major publication: "Bush to Give Speech on Iraq Handover." Some sources say that he's going to detail actual policy, some say, well, not really, it's largely going to be an "inspirational" speech. I'm sure it will all be in the eye of the beholder. I have yet to be able to stomach more than five minutes of any speech Bush has ever given since he either puts on his pained deer-in-the-headlights look of sheer vacuousness, or else he puts on his State of the Union, "hell, they'll applaud any crap I toss at 'em" smug near-sneer. Some conservatives, and Andrew Sullivan surely comes to mind, always seem to think he comes across strong and determined, a bold leader. I notice this happens especially and paradoxically at moments when W. seems to be in the worst of his death grips of facial agony. But again, I can't stand watching him speak anymore, I just read the transcripts, which I suspect is the case with a lot of conservatives as well, because otherwise there would be no explaining such enconiums.

In any case, I'm sure, post-biking accident, he's got a good makeup artist working for him. As Josh Micah Marshall points out, there's a strange kind of poetic justice to Bush's spill, after Bush's recent comment that Iraq is finally ready "to have the training wheels taken off".

Policy speech, or empty stay-the-course rhetoric? Policy speech, or meaningless boilerplate "bold leader" mumbo jumbo? Hmmm... Of course I'll be hugely disappointed if he actually comes across sounding as though he might actually have some grasp of the situation for real, but he hasn't let me down thus far...