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."

Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them.

Yesterday Steve Gilliard presented a convincing case that President Bush will not finish out his term. Steve builds his argument around the spectacle of our looming loss in Iraq and how it will hurt Republican political fortunes, forcing Republican politicians to extricate themselves from ties to the administration and it's record.

Interestingly Gilliard doesn't argue that Bush will be impeached but that his own personality flaws will drive him from office:

But I also think that Bush is not mentally healthy. You can take the Capital Hill Blue stories with a grain of salt, but that Vargas interview was downright creepy, not only verbally, but physically. Like he was trying to convince her his world was the real one. And she wasn't buying it.

Bush literally erupts when questioned. The DW Ports deal is just one example. No sane pol would threaten a veto when he is going to lose, over an issue which he cannot convince anyone he is right. If Tony Blair had given the Tories this kind of gift, he'd be drinking beer and watching Newcastle from the stands.

You cannot stab your own party in the back and survive, and Bush is deaf to the cries of his own party.

I agree with much of what he's saying and would like to hope he's right, but I just can't. I think he's forgotten something pretty big in his analysis.

We have most certainly lost Iraq. Considering who planned and executed the invasion and occupation we have lost Iraq the moment our M1As rolled accross the Kuwaiti border. Wishes don't bring horses or democracies. Neither does bullshit.

But where Gilliard's argument collapses is when he assumes the responsibility for the loss in Iraq will fall on Bush, his administration and the Republican congress. It may used to have been that a President who pushed for a war with the full support of his party and over the legitimate objections of critics would own the consequences of that war. That's just not the way things work anymore.

We all know that in the darkest dungeons of the Rovian war room, Wingnut Drow work feverishly to put together a convincing argument that the planning, execution and post-invasion occupation of Iraq were solely the responsibility of Howard Dean.

Because it's always important to remember that the thing that delineates post-9/11 thinking from pre-9/11 thinking is that in the post-9/11 world objective reality no longer matters.

The Mad Hatter may have been as crazy as a moonbat but he still ran the tea party.