"What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over…"
They need to do. Not George, his ass is covered. George doesn't need to show assertive diplomacy, not like Clinton or Daddy Bush or even Reagan and Nixon.
Back in those days, when there was a government, we had shuttle diplomacy, Kissenger or Baker or Albright going from Middle East capital to capital, making "shit" calm down. Per Slate:
Yet six days into Israel's most violent border conflict in nearly a quarter-century, President George W. Bush seems in no hurry to put Condoleezza Rice on a plane. At the G-8 summit in Moscow today, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Bush (in a private conversation picked up by an open mic) that things in the region could quickly "spiral out of control." Bush interrupted him. "Yeah," he said, "she's going. I think Condi's going to go pretty soon."
Okay, maybe the U.S. needs to be careful dealing with repugnant regimes, but in the past we dropped the posturing and acted as honest broker. Thanks to BushCheneyCo, now we can't:
Because Bush tends to cut off contact with regimes he doesn't like, the United States has no diplomatic ties with Syria (or Iran), no way to strike a deal or to communicate formally.With whom does Bush have leverage? Seemingly not with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the strong-armer about whom Bush said in 2001:
"I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul."
His soul, dude, you can't even get a deal at the G8 to sell them U.S. beef and pork. And Putin earns laughs rejecting Bush's lecture on democracy. "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy that they have in Iraq, quite honestly." Some pundits have taken Bush's under-the-breath "Just wait" as a sign he's thinking of meddling in Russia, or maybe some grand change is going to happen there, but what it really seems to mean is what Bush and his fellotravelersrs have been saying to the American people. Someway, somehow, somewhere waaaaaay down the line, Iraq is going to be a success of democracy. Just wait.
What is the #1 achievement of El Presidente Georgie Bush this past week? The U.S. doesn't have to increase it's emission control standards. Now there's something to be proud about, pissing off the Greens and increasing global warming. Well done. As in, my children by the sun.
Meanwhile, the Emperor is losing his clothes by the day. Newly elected Italian Prime Minister Romano Pradi avoids appearing in a group photo with Bush. He's, uh, "on the phone" lol.
Back in the U.S., a normally MOR NPR roundtable has a journalists unable to keep up the charade, calling the Emperor out for his total and complete foreign policy collapse:
It looks to me what we're seeing is a possible total failure of what looked like a very promising - at least from the administration eyes - approach to the middle east which was to go to Iraq, forget the crisis in Israel and Palestine, and put it on the back burner with benign neglect and focus everything on Iraq. If you could change Iraq, democratize Iraq, make it a model for all the Arab world that it was going to spread and you'd have a much more positive result. It looks like 5 years after we started this, we really have a very negative result, the whole area is in flames, the balances of the equations, as you pointed out, between the Sunnis and the Shia have shifted. We're seeing more turmoil here than we've seen in decades.
Frank Rich explains it so we all can understand why:
Only if we remember that the core values of this White House are marketing and political expediency, not principle and substance, can we fully grasp its past errors and, more important, decipher the endgame to come. The Bush era has not been defined by big government or small government but by virtual government. Its enduring shrine will be a hollow Department of Homeland Security that finds more potential terrorist targets in Indiana than in New York.
Writer Juliette Kayyem about Bush coming into the G8 Summit expecting to isolate Putin:
Literally, in less than a few hours, the G7 leaves Bush as odd man out over the crises in the Middle East. And it is a crises. Iraq, perhaps gratefully, will be off the agenda, and Iran may be so subtley smart that even their nuclear ambitions pale in comparison, but what was to be Bush's moment can't be given the world's strong sense that but for Bush's agenda (both not being involved with the Israeli/Palestinian peace process and then of course Iraq), we wouldn't be in this crises.
Those ratty old armchair Neoconservatives, led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and even Newt Gingrich are using the current unrest as a last ditch call for Total War, the kind we would need a draft and War Bonds to precipitate at this point. But do they even feel anything when forever Conservative George Will delivers a smackdown, in Tuesday's Washington Post:
As for the "healthy" repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication's powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation's behalf before all of the surprises -- all of them unpleasant -- that Iraq has inflicted. And regarding the "appeasement" that the Weekly Standard decries: Does the magazine really wish the administration had heeded its earlier (Dec. 20, 2004) editorial advocating war with yet another nation -- the bombing of Syria?
Jonathan Chait deserves credit for asking the most Emperor's New Clothes of all questions this past Sunday:
Bush's supporters have insisted for the last six years that liberal derision of the president's intelligence amounts to nothing more than cultural snobbery. We don't like his pickup truck and his accent, the accusation goes, so we hide our blue-state prejudices behind a mask of intellectual condescension...
...But the more we learn about how Bush operates, the more we can see we were right from the beginning. It matters that the president values his gut reaction and disdains book learnin'. It's not just a question of cultural style. The president's narrow intellectual horizons have real consequences, sometimes cataclysmic ones.
When I went to college at Michigan, I occasionally played pickup basketball with varsity football players. They obviously felt athletically superior to me. I didn't resent them for it — because they were.
Dumbfuck + authoritarian asshole. The worst combination.
Want a final image of Bush at G8, the last one folks will remember?
Bush as half-assed masseur.
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