HERE IS ARGUABLY the most outrageous statement in Bush's speech tonight:

"Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying and the suffering is real," Bush said, according to excerpts released ahead of time by the White House. "It is worth it."

Easy to say, when the violence does not affect you and when the blood being shed is neither your blood nor the blood of your children or anyone you love or know. How dare this man for whom "suffering" is only a word in the dictionary tell Americans that the violence and bloodshed is worth it? For the record, nothing that has happened in Iraq since the invasion began makes even one American's or Iraqi's bloody death worth it.

This speech was supposed to address Americans' concerns about the war, but all it did was repeat the same propaganda and cheerleader talk. It was boring and totally uninspired. You'd think with the latest polls showing Bush's approval rating at only 45 percent and with 53 percent of the public disapproving of his performance, that he would use this speech as an opportunity to gain back some of that lost trust. But all he did was repeat the same old platitudes, misinformation, and lies.

Christy at ThinkProgress live-blogged the speech, and has interesting things to say about Bush's passing off old ideas as new. She also counts the number of times certain words or phrases appeared in the speech (for example, 21 references to "freedom"; 0 references to "weapons of mass destruction"); and exposes Bush's hypocrisy, lies, mixed messages, exaggerations, dishonest credit-grabbing, refusal to face reality, convenient memory lapses, circular thinking, more lies, and repetition of old canards.