While Barack Obama is shapeshifting from a polished JFK into a befuddled Richard Nixon with each successive appearance, the chronically inarticulate George W. Bush seems–in Hillary’s terminology–to have found his voice. At a White House press conference yesterday, the President defied the State Department’s new and Orwellian prohibition on describing Islamist terrorists as having anything at all to do with Islam:

And so in Afghanistan, yes, we’re making progress. Does that mean that it’s over? No, it doesn’t mean it’s over. We’re in a long struggle, as I’ve told you many a time, against these jihadists. You defeat them ultimately by the advance of democracy. See, this is an ideological struggle. These aren’t isolated, law-enforcement moments. We’re dealing with a group of ideologues who use asymmetrical warfare — that means killing innocent people — to try to achieve their objectives. And one objective is to drive us out of Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, or anywhere else where we try to confront them.

Last week, the AP quoted the new State Department directive:

Regarding ‘jihad,’ even if it is accurate to reference the term, it may not be strategic because it glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have and damages relations with Muslims around the world.

When watching the video of the exchange, you can see Bush pause before settling on “jihadists.” In that pause, the President measured the dubious cost of “glamoriz[ing] terrorism” against the deadly cost of inaccuracy. For a man usually tortured in his effort to find the right word, he came through admirably.

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