WashingtonPost.com’s indispensable Dan Froomkin catches President Bush using one of his trademark rhetorical tactics:

Here’s the President of the United States using a straw-man argument to implicitly accuse opponents of his plan of being racist.

In Louisville, he said: “Oh, I know they say certain people aren’t capable of investing, you know, the investor class. It kind of sounds like to me, you know, a certain race of people living in a certain area. I believe everybody’s got the capability of being in the investor class. I believe everybody should be allowed to watch their own assets grow, not just a few people.”

Keen made mention of that quote in her USA Today story, but then simply explained that “Bush is trying to overcome concerns that investment accounts are too risky for anyone but the wealthy and are out of reach for minorities.”

No one, as far as I can tell, took notice of Bush’s implicit accusation of racism — in fact it looks like no one but Keen mentioned it at all.

The key to this tactic is that it allows Bush to attach the aura of racism to opponents of private accounts, yet it can’t be disproved because he never names a specific person or statement. Unbelievable. He frequently does the same thing when talking about the war in Iraq, attributing opposition to the war to “some” people who don’t believe Iraqis are capable of democracy, which again attaches the vague stigma of racism to all of his opponents.

(And while we’re talking about Bush’s tendencies to make up stories, don’t forget about the “trifecta” story, in which Bush told an ever-changing story about a never-documented conversation with a “fellow,” “guy,” a “reporter,” or a “male reporter” in which he publicly listed exceptions to his promise not to run budget deficits. For more on Bush’s penchant for nondisprovable but misleading claims, see All the President’s Spin in general.)

Update 4/3: I should also point out that Bush is the one making deceptive, logically inconsistent sales pitches to different minority groups.