Determined to bolster Senator Kerry's talking point that President Bush is a screw up, the press spun a sentence fragment by Colin Powell as negatively as they could: Situation in Iraq 'Getting Worse' blared the AP.

Here's what he really said: "It's getting worse. And the reason it's getting worse is that they are determined to disrupt the election. They do not want the Iraqi people to vote for their own leaders in a free, democratic election. And because it's getting worse, we will have to increase our efforts to defeat it, not walk away and pray and hope for something else to happen"

And that, if we recall, is precisely what Mr. Bush and others in his administration have been saying would happen all along. Come to think of it, didn't he warn us from the beginning that this whole Terror War might take a while?