NEW RIFFS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE

Tony Snow called in to Limbaugh's show today to spin the Iraq benchmark report (excerpt of the conversation here; full transcript at least temporarily available free here).

So, are you ready for the new Bushie slogan? A slogan the White House likes so much that Tony Snow used it twice? Get ready -- here it is:

"A surge of facts."

That's it. Really. I'm not making it up:

...SNOW: Well, a couple things. First let me back up. The interim report is the beginning of a new kind of surge and it's a surge of facts, because what's happened with a lot of the war in Iraq, as you know, Rush, is that people get pictures of dead bodies, but they don't get any sense of what's actually going on on the ground....

(Emphasis in original.)

...SNOW: ... I also think that the reason we need a surge in facts is a lot of members in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, they go back home and people say, "Get out of that war! It's a terrible war!" Well, that's because all they see is a failure narrative that gets played out on their TV screens. On the other hand, when they start getting a glimpse of what our folks are doing, I think they're going to change their minds....

That's it -- "a surge of (in) facts." That's their clever new rhetorical gambit.

No, it's not going to work.

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Ah, but that's not the only riff Snow and Limbaugh were testing out on the show. Here's one that's cleverer -- and I worry that it's just clever enough to fool some people:

RUSH: You know the dirty little secret is that if -- if, and this is a hypothetical. If a Democrat wins the White House in '08, they're not pulling the troops out of there. They will not.

SNOW: Of course not. You see this all the time, Rush, which is on the political stump people go out and they say stuff that they know just isn't true. They know it. The American people want somebody to say, "We're going to leave the war and we're going to have peace." They know perfectly well that if we leave, what you're going to have is the equivalent of a detonation where terror is going to start emanating out from Iraq that's going to gobble up the Middle East. It's going to go to North Africa. It's going to go to Europe. It's going to go to Pakistan, and sooner or later it's going to wash up on our shore and it's going to be a big problem. They know this, and so it is absolutely irresponsible for anybody to think that you pull out of the fight before you win because, if you don't, the American people and the whole world are huge losers.

RUSH: Well, but my point is politically the Democrats are misleading everybody. They would love to lose this war but they'd love that loss to be hung around the president's neck.

SNOW: Yeah.

RUSH: They're not going to pull out. If they are running the country in '08, they are not going to pull outta there and cause defeat and have it associated with them. The troops are not coming out of there until the situation you've described is established.

SNOW: Exactly right -- and, you know what? One of the things I like about working for this president is he understands this, and what's he trying to do? He is trying to give the next president, Democrat or Republican, the tools to win....

Hey, Karl, that's not half bad -- in a sick, evil way. It can work as a right-wing pundits' meme -- "Democrats don't really want to end the war because they want to end the war, they just want Bush to lose" -- and, simultaneously, it's easy to imagine Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman and their ilk saying, "A Democrat who wins the White House won't really be able to end this war, so these promises are all a bunch of malarkey, right?" So you tell the GOP base that the Dems want to end their precious war, and you tell everyone else the Dems won't end the war, so don't even bother to vote for them.

Good Lord, it just might work.

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UPDATE: Greetings, Raw Story readers. Just FYI, Snow also used "surge of facts" in a conference call with righty bloggers.