If you read All the President’s Spin closely, you’ll be astonished at the Bush administration’s love for straw men. Here’s a great example from President Bush’s speech on Iraq yesterday:

Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 — and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

As Matthew Yglesias points out, this is a ludicrous argument:

The president takes an accurate statement (“extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq”), rephrases it in straw-man form (“our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of the radicals”), and then rebuts the straw-man (“we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001”) and goes home. Obviously, there were radicals before the Iraq War. But as the CIA has pointed out, there are now even more radicals thanks to it. That Bush inherited a pre-existing bad situation is hardly an excuse for making it worse.