In writing my post about President Bush’s latest straw man rhetoric this morning, I was struck by an interesting similarity in the way that he dismisses criticism of his two signature initiatives — the tax cuts and the war in Iraq. In both cases, he manipulates the standard by which the policy is to be judged.

On tax cuts, for instance, the relevant question with respect to their effect on the deficit is how much higher revenue would have been had we not passed the tax cuts. President Bush repeatedly asserts that the tax cuts increase revenues, citing recent surges in funds coming in to the Treasury, and thereby shifts the standard of judgment to whether revenue is higher now than it was at some previous time. However, even if revenue does increase year-on-year, the evidence is overwhelming that tax cuts reduce revenue relative to what otherwise would have happened — even administration economists agree. (In Bush’s case, the recent increases in revenue followed a massive decline in previous years — see the latest analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

Bush also habitually manipulates counterfactuals on Iraq, as WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin points out, quoting this statement from Bush:

We weren’t in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren’t in Iraq, and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside your country, Mr. President. We weren’t in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. We weren’t in Iraq when they bombed the Cole. We weren’t in Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But as Froomkin argues, the relevant question is not whether a terrorist threat existed before Iraq; it’s whether “invading Iraq has made the threat of terrorism since then worse than it otherwise would have been”:

No one is suggesting that the invasion of Iraq was responsible for terrorist act that predate that invasion! The argument is that invading Iraq has made the threat of terrorism since then worse than it otherwise would have been. Reciting past terrorist acts is almost laughably nonresponsive. And yet it’s a staple of Bush’s argument.

By dodging the relevant counterfactual, Bush avoids the obvious conclusion that was reached in the National Intelligence Estimate — the war has increased the terrorist threat. But the really tricky counterfactual is this: what would have happened if the press corps had actually explained how Bush keeps shifting the goalposts on his key policy initiatives?