Bush runs White House with Sports Metaphors

Makes sense. The White House and Republicans like to talk about "winning" in Iraq as if it were a football game. Such terminology only serves to simplify something that is very complex. Especially since we don't know what winning in Iraq is:

Running the country is no game. It just sounds like one sometimes. In the Bush White House, sports are a metaphor for life. Better keep up if you want to play.

Consider how President Bush describes his time left in office.

"I'm going to sprint to the finish," he likes to say.

And it ain't limited to war:

The sports imagery changes when slow is the preferred way to go for the White House. Take the way the administration defends its global warming strategy against criticism it has lacked urgency.

"This is a marathon," explained Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "It's not a sprint."

But we've come to expect simplistic analogies from simpleton:

It is now understood that when a topic becomes popular to kick around, it is a political football. The White House has used that term to describe an eclectic range of matters, from medicare to taxes to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.