In speaking off-the-cuff, as to the reporters in Donnelly last week, he repeats his usual words, phrases, and lines, mix-and-match style; still, it's easier in such a session (no matter how weak the questions lobbed at him) to sense an edge of confusion about how to make his world stand in some relation to reality. For instance, in the Donnelly exchange, which lasted 12 minutes including the niceties -- "Q: Any fishing? THE PRESIDENT: I don't know yet. I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm kind of hanging loose, as they say. (Laughter.)" -- he offered this strange, new explanation for the development of terrorism in the Iraqi neck of the woods:

"[W]e had a policy that just said, let the dictator [Saddam Hussein] stay there, don't worry about it. And as a result of dictatorship, and as a result of tyranny, resentment, hopelessness began to develop in that part of the world, which became the -- gave the terrorists capacity to recruit."

However, in his speeches, those perfect artifacts from another universe, delivered only before the most receptive audiences, usually under campaign-like conditions, everything is as the President wants it to be. There, at present, he inhabits a world that begins with the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 -- imagine how a Democrat might be pilloried for comparing the making of the already tattered "Islamic" constitution of Iraq (just hailed by Iranian Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads that country's ultra-conservative Guardian Council) to ours -- passes through World War II (where we successfully occupied two countries, Japan and Germany) and more or less ends in the glory days of the Cold War. Missing, of course, is the one "small" conflict that, right now, is on everyone's mind all over Washington, not to say the U.S. -- Vietnam. You won't find that name, nor words like "quagmire" or "bogged down" either.

The President's speech-world is a world of the will in every sense. (The terrorists typically try to break ours and get us to retreat.) In Idaho, he used will, as in "will of the majority," 6 times, but the will of the willed act (we will not allow the terrorists, America will not wait to be attacked again, will confront emerging threats, will stay on the offensive, will fight, will win, will be on the hunt, will prevail) 34 times. There may never have been political speeches that used the word in all its senses (except as a document of bequeathment) so often. In this tic, his speeches catch perhaps the most striking aspect of his administration since September 11, 2001 -- its driving urge to impose a worldview by force on the rest of the planet.

In speeches like those in Utah and Idaho, he offers up a warrior's world of words. The word war itself appears in his Idaho speech 26 times, along with attack, attacks, attacked (11), fight, fighters, fighting (10) , battle lines, battlefronts (2), struggle (2), strike (2), and one of his absolute favorites, the phrase on the hunt or alternately hunt down (we will stay on the, side by side with Iraqi forces, our common enemies), used 3 times. Of course, no war would be worth much if you didn't win (the war on terror, in Iraq), used twice, for which you need to defeat (the terrorists), wielded 9 times.

In the President's speeches, the world of "the enemy" or "the terrorists" is imposingly frightening, terrifying enough to fit the bill for any Evil Empire. Here is just a partial list of words associated with it from the Idaho speech:

Enemy (fight the, in our midst, across the globe, on many fronts): 6
Threat, threatened: 8
Fail (what terrorists will do in the end)/failed (as in, states -- what terrorists cause): 7
Brutal, brutality: 5
Violence (brutal, and extremism): 5
Kill: 5
Retreat (what they want us to do, back into the shadows): 5
Murder, murdered: murderous: 4
Destroy/Destruction (our way of life, havoc and, death and): 4
Hateful, hate-filled: 3
Dangerous (times, enemies): 2
Plotted, plotting: 2
Crushing/crushes (blow, all dissent): 2
Havoc: 2
Death: 2
Assassination: 2
Intimidation: 1
Extremism: 1
Evil (seen freedom conquer): 1

Between the two sides in this global war stand the innocent and, as it happens, we do share one thing in common with the terrorists in relation to the innocent -- a strategy (we've followed a clear), 4; (they have a, crushing blow to their), 2.

Fortunately, on our side of the ledger in support of our strategy to spread freedom and destroy the terrorists, can be mustered a powerful set of words that are ours alone:

Help, helped, helping: 10
Defend: 9
Protect, protecting (your neighbors, all Americans, the American homeland, our people, our cities and borders and infrastructure, against every threat): 8
Security (of every American, false sense of, to our own citizens, forces, for our children and grandchildren, for the election, of our country): 7
Democracy (link to any of the above as in "freedom and…"): 6
Hope (usually connected to freedom): 6
Secure (democracy, their freedom, the peace): 3
Mission: 3
Victory: 3
Homeland (American, the): 2
Progress: 1

On our side of the ledger, even God makes a series of cameo appearances (4).

You could yourself take the above words and phrases and, as you might a deck of cards, shuffle them into some of the countless combinations that make up any Bush speech or meeting with the press. And yet there is still a study to be done of how words live and die in given moments. After all, this President has spoken the words terror, war, and freedom literally hundreds of thousands of times since September 11th, 2001, and yet now they are visibly dying on the lips.

Cindy's World of Words

For a long time, George had a knack for speaking to audiences and seeming so personal, no matter how large his crowds, impersonal the setting, or scripted his performance. It was this sense of him that Cindy Sheehan seems to have begun to crack open. Put her words up against his -- she's willing to be no less repetitious, no less fierce in her view of the world -- and hers are the words that now feel personal, that come from the heart and cut to the bone, that connect. They seem like telegrams sent directly from reality, and from an irrefutable core of loss -- of lives, of safety, of security, of well-being -- that ever more Americans are beginning to fear is what George's world is all about. That's undoubtedly why the normal set of right-wing attacks and smears launched against Sheehan, however successful against others in the past, have simply not penetrated. Who, after all, can deny the reality of the individual world of the mother of a war-dead son?