Or liberal media spin.

WASHINGTON — Confronted with strong opposition to his Iraq policies, President Bush decides to interpret public opinion his own way. Actually, he says, people agree with him.

Democrats view the November elections that gave them control of Congress as a mandate to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. They’re backed by evidence; election exit poll surveys by The Associated Press and television networks found 55 percent saying the U.S. should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq.

The president says Democrats have it all wrong: the public doesn’t want the troops pulled out — they want to give the military more support in its mission.

“Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq,” he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. “I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course.”

Increasingly isolated on a war that is going badly, Bush has presented his alternative reality in other ways, too. He expresses understanding for the public’s dismay over the unrelenting sectarian violence and American losses that have passed 3,400, but then asserts that the public’s solution matches his.

“A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?” he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. “When are you going to win?”

You got to love how Loven states that the “war is going badly” as though it were a fact.  You also have to love how she posits that the Democrats were elected because of American dissatisfaction with Iraq instead of American dissatisfaction with a bunch of corrupt Republicans who had abandoned the conservative values that got them elected.

One can almost taste the objectivity.

Anyway, since Loven is using a media poll to back up her conclusions here, I’ll use one to back up mine.  Here’s a poll, more recent than the one Loven uses, from CNN which indicates the following:

• Most Americans don’t think that the war is lost.
• More Americans favor setting benchmarks for Iraq than setting a hard withdrawal date.
• Most Americans blame Democrats for not funding the troops in a timely fashion.
• Most Americans feel that the President is supportive the troops.  Most Americans also feel that the Democrats are not.
• The idea of setting a withdrawal date for Iraq in March of next year is immensely unpopular.

So what do we conclude from this?  Maybe that American opinions on Iraq aren’t as cut-and-dried as Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media like Loven would have us believe, and that President Bush is entitled to his opinion in this regard.

I, for one, feel that most of the public’s perception about Iraq is heavily skewed by biased media reporting, which refuses to cover our progress in Iraq alongside the negative stories, and opinion polls which routinely oversample liberals and then are cherry picked (like the CNN poll I linked above) so that only the results matching the liberal media’s agenda get news coverage.  Because those polls are more about shaping public opinion than measuring it.