Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report watched the Bush press conference yesterday and did some fact-checking. One item from his post:

* Asked how he measures progress in Iraq with all the death and destruction, the president said, "Well, one way you do it is you measure progress based upon the resilience of the Iraqi people."

This was my personal favorite of the day. Apparently, we're no longer looking at progress in the war by indicators that we can actually measure (casualties, oil production, terrorist attacks, etc.), but instead by the amorphous concept of "resilience." Now all we need is a resilience-o-meter and we'll have some valuable data to consider.

Yes, but "resilience" could be construed as endurance of those bad things we can measure -- terrorist attacks and so on.

And if those things get worse and Iraqis (at least the ones who haven't been murdered and left in ditches) manage to hang in there, that means resilience is going up. That means, according to President Bush, the worse things get, the better we're doing -- look at all that Iraqi resilience.

See? We're winning.