A trickle or a surge?

If all goes as planned, I'll be interviewing St. John's University Communications professor Dr. Richard Ice in an hour or so about the rhetoric and stagecraft Bush employs in his speech tonight. For prep, I'm wondering about the sudden appearance of this word "surge" to describe the president's planned deployment of 21,500 additional troops in Iraq? The term, obviously, has an active, almost optimistic (and, may I point out, temporary) ring to it--like waves crashing on an unsuspecting (wimpy, third-world) beach--and it doesn't carry the connotations its Vietnamy synonym, "escalation," does.

The Columbia Journalism Review says "surge" is "President Bush's word, a descriptor that at the very least belongs within quotations. So far, so good. It seems that a history of being burned by insufficient skepticism of the Bush administration and its policies has taught journalists and editors to put nearly everything in quotes."

Yes, but will the press stop using the term, sans quotes, should Bush's master plan involve a protracted or gradual addition of troops--an "escalation," if you will--instead of a massive and overwhelming spike in military resources?

Osama at large: not a failure but "a success that hasn't occurred yet"

I guess I'm succeeding at more things than I realized; it's just that the success hasn't happened yet. From TPMmuckracker (via TDI):

Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden is still at large -- but that's not a failure of White House policy, says Frances Fragos Townsend. As she explained to CNN's White House correspondent Ed Henry last night:

HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we're going to get him. Still don't have him. I know you are saying there's successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That's a failure.

TOWNSEND: Well, I'm not sure -- it's a success that hasn't occurred yet. I don't know that I view that as a failure.