Earlier today I said the media had seized the war from Bush, who wants it to be all about him. Apparently, though, USA Today wants to help George W. Narcissus wrest it back -- see this fawning portrait of His Serene Highness.

TBOGG has already had at the article. But let me just add this: If I were a GI actually fighting this war, in a desert where the temperatures were about to enter into the 90s, possibly about to face a WMD attack in a sweat-generating protective suit, I would find it just a wee bit difficult to feel sympathy for a man about whom it is said,

He's being hard on himself; he gave up sweets just before the war began.

Elsewhere, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans says,

"...He understands that he is the one person in the country, in this case really the one person in the world, who has a responsibility to protect and defend freedom."

Excuse me? The troops? I thought the whole rationale for the war was that they were protecting and defending our freedoms?

Oh, and here's the last paragraph of the article:

The president's friends and family fret about him, but advisers say the pressure doesn't seem to be getting to him. "He's not one of those people who blows with the wind," Rumsfeld says. "He has a very good inner gyroscope, a stabilizer that keeps him centered."

Yup, it's all about him.

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Another passage from the USA Today article needs to be noted:

[Bush] is convinced that the Iraqi leader is literally insane and would gladly give terrorists weapons to use to launch another attack on the United States.

The thought of another assault on the United States horrifies Bush. Aides say he believes history and heaven will judge him by his ability to prevent one.

I've said repeatedly that I think Bush really believes this. No chem or bio or nuclear weapons were used in Gulf War I, none have been used in this war so far, none have been found so far (and the only evidence of al-Qaeda-related activity or possible WMD work has been in the Kurdish-controlled north), none have been given by Iraq to Palestinian suicide bombers -- yet Bush says, essentially, that Saddam = Osama. Bush's willful ignorance and refusal to distinguish Saddam's M.O. from bin Laden's are among the reasons we're fighting this war.