As I read more of the administrations' recent cheerleading tour I keep coming upon a phrase that everyone seems to be using, put it's the President who repeats it most often - A variation on the them "If we don't lose our nerve". However when you parse them out they all boil down to a simple playground taunt from childhood.- "You're chicken".
Remember your playground etiquette? All questionable ideas grew out of a dare, and if you declined to take the dare, "you're chicken" was the most common response. Don't want to jump off that roof? "We'll succeed if we don't lose our nerve". Don't want to run across the street through traffic? "It's important that we don't lose our nerve" the litany goes on with this new talking point.
Here's the problem though, and it was just as true on the playground, the one that's calling you chicken doesn't have any "skin in the game". It's pretty easy for Mr. Bush to accuse the rest of us as being chicken because he only really loses if we don't take the dare. Really this is just a different take on the "Bring 'em on". It's fine for the President to taunt the "mean kids" because it's not his arse that's going to be shot at.
In an administration that has seen some spectacular blunders, the President calling the country chicken instead of providing any real plan is especially unseemly. Even for them...