Will you look at the man? He's a Freudian delight; he crawls with clues!

It's with a sense of bitter irony that I note Fareed Zakaria's ridiculous piece "What Bush Got Right" about foreign policy came out in the same week yet another foreign policy disaster arose given in large part to the continued incompetence of Bush's entire administration in this arena. They've been in over their heads since he first took the oath of office and, contrary to Zakaria's assertion to the contrary, nothing has happened to change that situation.

I don't like to write or even think about these sorts of global crisis these days. Truth be told I've been irrationally trying to focus on other stuff in the hope that it would blow over, resolve itself or the adults in the Western European community would step in and bring and bring a peaceful resolution to the fighting.

I'd be the first to admit that's a naive and unrealistic approach. It's just that I have a hard time with accepting the alternative; that our leadership are nothing but a bunch stupid children. I find myself very nervous watching Bush and Cheney poke at Russia over the conflict in Georgia. I've used the example many times but it's akin to being trapped in a room with a monkey that's playing with a grenade. Eventually he's going to figure out how to pull out the pin...

I'm second to nobody in my opinion that the "tough guys" that make up this administration are really a bunch of blustering pansies. One thing I've learned is that the guys that talk the most smack are usually the guys that spent most of high school stuffed in a locker. They're the guys who are cheerleaders or look for excuses to get out of going to Vietnam. They're cowards who can't back up the crap that comes out of their mouths. As a man I don't have much of an opinion of the manliness of men like Bush and Cheney.

Having said that I also recognize it's for exactly this reason that they feel they have something to prove, especially if they're own hide isn't on the line. That's why I'm not sure the tack that Matt Yglesias (via Digby) takes in calling them out is the best one to use here.

"This highlights, I think, some of the limits of the kind of bluff-and-bluster approach to foreign policy that seems popular among conservatives these days. Or, rather, it highlights the fact that popular as bluster-based policy making is on the American right it can have some extremely high costs and that, tragically, a large proportion of those costs can wind up being borne by the people who were nominally supposed to be the beneficiaries. "

Bush has been throwing some extremely bellicose language at Russia yesterday. The kind of language I can't remember being used by an American president since at least the Berlin Wall came down. Pointing out that he's all hat and no cattle might not be the best thing to do here. On a personal level he's a coward. But he's also an incurious, stupid coward who has demonstrated zero predilection towards considering the consequences of his decisions whether to our security as a nation or the well-being of the troops under his charge.

I believe the phrase is "don't poke the bear." In the case of George W. Bush I would change that to "don't poke the teddy bear, it's not stuffed properly."