He spun the temporary turnaround in Anbar province into a story of successful American assistance in response to the locals’ request — conveniently leaving out the fact that the locals began turning against Al-Qaeda there several months before his surge of troops even began, and that we stepped in to help re-take a region we had already given up for lost only after the locals who turned against the extremists there had begun showing progress without us.

He claimed that Baghdad is well on its way to peace and prosperity — not bothering to add that internal violence between factions there has decreased in large part due to ethnic cleansing by Shi’ite militias and the walling off of entire neighborhoods by U.S. forces. (Note to Mr. Bush: it’s specious to insist that “ordinary life is beginning to return” to a city in which “ordinary life” has forever been destroyed.)

He said that the success of his surge is what’s making it possible for us to begin decreasing troop levels in Iraq again — without acknowledging his own generals’ admissions that those troop levels could not be sustained much longer in any case — and he insisted that the Maliki government has been making significant progress towards meeting the benchmarks that it set for itself at our insistence, even though the latest reports issued by his own administration say the opposite.

The list of errors, omissions, and outright untruths in Mr. Bush’s speech last night is long, and there is no shortage of sources pointing them out this morning: McClatchy-D.C., the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, even National Public Radio, to name just a few among many.

A used-car salesman trying to peddle an old clunker without actually having to fix what’s wrong with it will clean it out, shine it up, and maybe (if the salesman’s a little less than honest, not that any of them ever are) turn back the odomometer so that it looks less worn-out than it actually is. But underneath the gloss it’s still just the same old clunker.

And while Mr. Bush did his best last night to sell us his old clunker without having to fix it first, his supposedly new “Return on Success” plan is still the same as the “Operation Together Forward” plan he tried to sell us last winter, which in itself was just a new name for the same failed policies and flawed strategies that he’s been using in Iraq all along.

And we’re not buying it this time, gloss or no gloss.