Hick Shtick

FINALLY we have President Bush’s rationale for waging war on Saddam Hussein. It is, the president told several House and Senate leaders on Wednesday, that Saddam “has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction.” This use of “crawfished” says a lot about our president. But not what he and others think it says.

The first reaction of the press was to howl that “to crawfish” isn’t a verb. The second was to reverse course and admit that, well, yes, it is listed in the “Oxford English Dictionary.” It means “to retreat from a position taken up.”