Changing definitions to manufacture "progress"

From the President's radio address (which unsurprisingly touts progress in Iraq.)

And despite the lack of oil revenue law on the books, oil revenue sharing is taking place. The Iraqi parliament has allocated more than $2 billion in oil revenue for the provinces. And the Shia-led government in Baghdad is sharing a significant portion of these oil revenues with Sunni provincial leaders in places like Anbar.

Okay, let's unfold this. The Iraqi government is paying money to the provinces from the Iraqi national budget. Yes, it is oil money, because oil is the only funding Iraq has right now, but it is not the same thing as the oil revenue law which looks to distribute the profits from the oil industry.

While I'm at it, let's look at this whole "bottom up reconciliation" lie, also in the radio address.

America will continue to urge Iraq's leaders to meet the benchmarks they have set. Yet Americans can be encouraged by the progress and reconciliation that are taking place at the local level. An American politician once observed that "all politics is local." In a democracy, over time national politics reflects local realities. And as reconciliation occurs in local communities across Iraq, it will help create the conditions for reconciliation in Baghdad as well.

The phrase reconciliation has been used to refer directly to the reconciliation between the national factions and parties that are conducting the civil war, Sunni and Shia, Sunni and Kurd. To try and claim that the installation of a Sunni mayor in a Sunni town in Sunni Anbar is reconciliation is absolute gobbledegook.

Although the Sunnis and US attacking each other less is good news from our side, the Iraqi factions are, in fact, much further apart than they were just a month or two ago.

So, we're seeing the September prespin here, a full month ahead of the reporting. This one's gonna be a whopper.

(Sunday: Reuters ("Bush says Iraqi government has not met goals") and AFP ("Bush moves away from benchmarks in assessing Iraq") both attack this Saturday radio address in less specifics.)