LOSING: IT'S THE NEW WINNING

Dave Noon has some good comments on Byron York's account of President Bush's recent meet and greet with the conservative journalistic apparat, which, despite York's best efforts, reveals a president whose understanding of his own policies still seems to be about as detailed as a crayon drawing. Yes, Byron, the lines are big and bold and manfully drawn, but it's still crayon.

Cliff May, responding to York's piece, takes this lesson away:

We have indeed allowed the dominant metric to become that "people are dying and so the enemy is winning." The MSM have driven that message hard. The enemy can continue to make people die so the public will go on thinking the enemy is winning. And if the enemy is winning, we’re losing. In such a circumstance, the public will conclude: Better to cut our loses now than endure slow-motion defeat.

It’s this simple: Change the metrics or lose the war.

Now that's some triple distilled, 100 proof winger. Of course we're using the wrong metric, because the metric we're using shows we're not winning. Don't rethink or repair the strategy, just redefine "winning" in a way that shows the strategy is working.

May indicates that he thinks we should return to the Vietnam method of defining success by the number of enemy dead. That way, I suppose, every time a shopkeeper, lawyer, teacher, cabdriver, or teenager is killed, no matter by whom, we can chalk one up for our side, because they were probably with the insurgency anyway. What could go wrong?

It all makes sense, of course, when you remember that these guys still believe the liberal media lost that war for us, just like they're losing this one.