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I recently rewatched the movie "Obsession -- Radical Islam's War Against the West." The film shows propaganda videos from Iran, which included shots of U.S. forces kicking in doors, missiles being launched, Arab children crying, Muslims running with their wounded. Interspersed throughout were images of a smiling President Bush.

None of this is particularly original. What stands out, though, is the realization that since this movie was released in 2006, the United States has increased troop levels in Iraq, redoubled efforts to rout al-Qaida there. If anything, Bush has given propagandists more fuel to inflame the anti-American Arab street.

Our forces might have driven Iraqis into the arms of the radicals. Instead, the reverse happened.

It seems Iraqis have decided that al-Qaida, not America, is the "foremost enemy." That al-Qaida, not America, had come to fight the people of Iraq.

Does this mean Iraqis want America encamped there forever? Of course not. Or that innocent life hasn't been lost as the result of U.S. actions? No.

"I'm really here today to reclaim our mountains."

-- Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, explaining at a Democratic National Convention news conference in Denver that before Colorado became a state, Kansas Territory stretched "to the summit of the Rocky Mountains"

"If Big Coal couldn't win in Kansas, where could they win?"

-- Sebelius again, at a Denver event sponsored by the environmental law firm Earthjustice

"The real question is: 'Who's the real Kansan in this race?' Well, I am."

Do we really want to put Christian faith on trial during this presidential election season? Is this really the debate we are called to undertake to nominate our president in November?

It seems this is the direction we are headed if we take heed of certain Christian voices.

Columnist Cal Thomas stated that Barack Obama "either hasn't read the Bible or, if he has, doesn't believe it if he embraces such thin theological wisps," which Thomas chose to highlight ("Obama's faith is not biblical," June 13 Opinion).

In a speech on his radio program last week, James Dobson raged against Obama by stating, "I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology." He also accused Obama of distorting the Bible and pushing a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution.

And The Eagle's own Brent Castillo jumped into the fray as he extolled the benefits of conservatism over the dangers of liberalism (June 19 Opinion). Conservative ideals, he suggested, "are generally better than liberal ones, and those conservative beliefs often lead people to make choices that are more beneficial to our society."

People campaign for the presidency by talking their heads off. By the time the winner reaches the White House, the habit is so ingrained that it is impossible to shake.

The result has been what professor Jeffrey Tulis of the University of Texas 21 years ago labeled "the rhetorical presidency," his term for an office in which the principal goal is to mobilize public opinion successfully enough to dominate the dealings with Congress and even foreign powers.

Now, another scholar, Elvin T. Lim of Wesleyan University, has offered a revision of the Tulis theory that sheds fascinating and disturbing light on the torrent of communications that are unleashed by the "communicator in chief." In a slim book titled "The Anti-Intellectual Presidency," he argues that the real problem is not the increased quantity of words coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. but the sharp decline in content -- especially of logical argument.

Complaints about vacuous official rhetoric and the "dumbing down" of presidential speeches, news conferences and interviews are standard fare. Lim found strong evidence to support those complaints, not just in his interviews with the retired speechwriters, but in the presidential texts themselves.

In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the second Bush. His tool is something called the Flesch Readability score -- a measure of the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. The higher the Flesch score, the simpler to get the meaning.