Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and
not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.

Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."

"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this
year, "who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health
care ... for all people."

Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such
assertions.

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what
"some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical
retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In
describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or
substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual
position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" - conveniently knocking down
a straw man of his own making.

Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow.
But experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president
makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is
just as problematic.

Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are
true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much
larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the
Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington
University in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses
the rules of legitimate discussion. "It's such a phenomenal hole in the national
debate that you can have arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All
politicians try to get away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here
is how much this administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."

Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative
debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters. Not long after
taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing law and began
portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.

The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of
measuring performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.

Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the
president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security
Department against Democrats. He told at least two audiences that some senators
opposing him were "not interested in the security of the American people." In
reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Bush himself
first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service
protections.

Running for re-election against Sen. John Kerry in 2004, Bush frequently
used some version of this line to paint his Democratic opponent as weaker in the
fight against terrorism: "My opponent and others believe this matter is a matter
of intelligence and law enforcement."

The assertion was called a mischaracterization of Kerry's views even by a
Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Straw men have made more frequent appearances in recent months, often on
national security - once Bush's strong suit with the public but at the center of
some of his difficulties today. Under fire for a domestic eavesdropping program,
a ports-management deal and the rising violence in Iraq, Bush now sees his
approval ratings hovering around the lowest of his presidency. Said Jamieson,
"You would expect people to do that as they feel more threatened."

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate
heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. "Some say perhaps we ought to
just pull out of Iraq," he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines
from other speeches. "That is foolhardy policy." Yet even the speediest plan, as
advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one
over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop
withdrawal timetable.

Recently defending his decision to allow the National Security Agency to
monitor without subpoenas the international communications of Americans
suspected of terrorist ties, Bush has suggested that those who question the
program underestimate the terrorist threat. "There's some in America who say,
'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,'" Bush said
during a January visit to the NSA.

The president has relied on straw men, too, on the topics of taxes and
trade, issues he hopes will work against Democrats in this fall's congressional
elections.

Usually without targeting Democrats specifically, Bush has suggested they
are big-spenders who want to raise taxes, because most oppose extending some of
his earlier tax cuts, and protectionists who do not want to open global markets
to American goods, when most oppose free-trade deals that lack protections for
labor and the environment.

"Some people believe the answer to this problem is to wall off our economy
from the world," he said this month in India, talking about the migration of
U.S. jobs overseas. "I strongly disagree."