Look into my eyes ... you are getting very sleepy....

The European Union and Iran are still struggling to come up with a formula that will satisfy concerns about Iran's intentions with regard to its nuclear programs as well as Iran's own insistence that it has the legal right to pursue nuclear energy. Part of the problem, of course, is that Iran most certainly does have that right - but that doesn't mean that concerns about potential proliferation are invalid.

The Shrub team, meanwhile, stands off to the side carping and complaining. It's like Iran and the EU are playing chess and the Shrubberies are the kibitzer, making snide comments about the moves and declaring loudly to no one in particular that they, of course, could do a lot better and that one of the players is trying to cheat.

It's hard to tell how much of that is for world consumption and how much is for domestic, but the escalation of the threat rhetoric has been cranked up another notch, based on what Reuters reports:

President Bush on Tuesday welcomed a decision by Iran to freeze sensitive nuclear activities but said that was not the final step and the Islamic republic needed to go further to show its commitment to abandoning nuclear weapons ambitions.

"The Iranians agreed to suspend but not terminate their nuclear weapons program. Our position is that they ought to terminate their nuclear weapons program," Bush said during a joint news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

So it's not even "we believe" it's actually a nuclear weapons program, not "our intelligence says that" it's a nuclear weapons program, it's just "their nuclear weapons program." Presented and immediately reinforced as a simple fact that is not in any question, just like Saddam's "stockpile of chemical weapons" was and soon, I expect, to be repeated endlessly like a hypnotic induction.

And of course the media simply records and replays the message like a telephone answering machine, covering their passive acceptance of this "creation of reality via blatant assertion" by the weasel phrase "he said." Because all they're doing then is accurately quoting, y'see, and mentioning that while Europe is concerned over the potential for proliferation, the US is alone in insisting Iran is trying to develop nukes becomes unnecessary editorializing.

A lot of these people need to take some remedial courses in basic journalism and learn the difference between a reporter and a stenographer.