dubay ain't gettin no respect, wonder why?

[boutons_]

Bye Bye Cowboy


Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar 's cover story for Time this week is en led "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy" and it may just feature the most devastating cover artwork since that Newsweek cover in December showing Bush in a bubble.

"[I]n the span of four years, the Administration has been forced to rethink the doctrine with which it hoped to remake the world as the strategy's ineffectiveness is exposed by the very policies it prescribed," Allen and Ratnesar write.

"So what happened? The most obvious answer is that the Bush Doctrine foundered in the principal place the U.S. tried to apply it. . . . If the toppling of Saddam Hussein marked the high-water mark of U.S. hegemony, the past three years have witnessed a steady erosion in Washington's ability to bend the world to its will.

"Despite appearances, the White House insists that Bush's goals have not changed. 'The President has always stressed that different cir stances warrant different responses,' says White House counselor Dan Bartlett. 'The impression that the doctrine of pre-emption was the only guiding foreign policy light is not true. Iraq was a unique cir stance in history, and the sense of urgency on certain decisions in the early part of the first term was reflective of a nation that had to take decisive action after being attacked.' "

David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times that Bush's Chicago news conference on Friday "was notable because it seemed to mark the completion of a rhetorical journey for Mr. Bush. It is a journey that has steadily moved away, in public pronouncements -- if not the president's own thinking -- from the lines he drew in the 2002 State of the Union address. In that famous 'axis of evil' speech, he identified the threats from Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the three most pressing post-9/11 challenges facing the United States.

" 'We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side,' he said in one of the most-quoted passages of what became the signature speech of his administration. 'I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.' "

By contrast, here's Bush on Friday in Chicago: "These problems didn't rise overnight, and they don't get solved overnight. . . . You know, the problem with diplomacy, it takes a while to get something done. If you're acting alone, you can move quickly."

Writes Sanger: "In short, Mr. Bush is discovering the limits of his own pre-emption doctrine -- and the frustrations of its alternative. He knows, aides say, that even to hint at military action or deadlines if Iran refuses to suspend enriching uranium, or if North Korea continues to test missiles and make bomb fuel, would probably destroy any chance of getting China and Russia aboard on a common strategy.

"But failing to lay out the consequences clearly -- the kind of straight talk Mr. Bush used to say distinguished his administration's foreign policy -- may embolden Iran and North Korea to try to run out the clock, produce more nuclear material and hope for a better deal with the next president."

Allen and Ratnesar, incidentally, see Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in ascendancy. They write: "Her push for pragmatism has rubbed off on hawks like Vice President Cheney, the primary intellectual force behind Bush's post-9/11 policies. 'There's a move, even by Cheney, toward the Kissingerian approach of focusing entirely on vital interests,' says a presidential adviser. 'It's a more focused foreign policy that is driven by realism and less by ideology.' "

To which I say: Phooey. As I wrote in my June 23 column , Cheney's worldview appears as ideological -- and grandiose -- as ever.

For some more background on foreign policy, I wrote in my March 16 column about how the Bush Doctrine appeared to be have died a while back. And I wrote in the Thursday column about the contrast between Bush's soaring rhetoric about spreading democracy and the mess it increasingly looks like he'll leave behind.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041100879.html

[boutons_]

but dubya still makes off-the-cuff bull cowboy remarks not worthy of a head of state:

==============

July 10, 2006

Bush: Chechen Warlord Deserved to Die

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:39 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush welcomed news that Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev had apparently been killed in a truck explosion in southern Russia.

''If he's in fact the person who ordered the killing of children in Beslan, he deserved it,'' Bush said Monday.

He made the comments in a roundtable interview with reporters from Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan ahead of his trip this week to Germany and to St. Petersburg, Russia, for a Group of Eight summit of global economic powers.

Basayev, 41, is believed responsible for modern Russia's worst terrorist attacks. These include the seizure of a Moscow theater in 2002 in which dozens of hostages and militants died, the 2004 school hostage taking in Beslan that killed 331, and the seizure of about 1,000 hostages at a hospital in Budyonnovsk that killed about 100.

He was killed Monday when a dynamite-laden truck exploded in a convoy, Russian officials said.

[Ya Vez]

yes people that order taking school children hostages don't deserve to die....

something is definetly wrong with boutons...

[boutons_]

He has to be proved to have done it, due process, etc, etc. The rule of law, not the rule of the lynch mob.

Of course, most reasonsable people expect such a person, found guiilty, to be executed or locked up without parole.

But those aren't words a US president should be spewing. He's supposed to be becoming more diplomatic, not continuing to be inflammatory in the "Bring 'em on" tone.

No doubt, hisitory will put dubya down as one of the worst US presidents. The guy is beyond stupid, totally inarticulate, without gravitas, no intellect, emotionally immature. Which is why is so popular with the rabble sheeple.

We know why the rich + corps like him. Follow the tax-cut money.

[RandomGuy]

He has to be proved to have done it, due process, etc, etc. The rule of law, not the rule of the lynch mob.

Of course, most reasonsable people expect such a person, found guiilty, to be executed or locked up without parole.

But those aren't words a US president should be spewing. He's supposed to be becoming more diplomatic, not continuing to be inflammatory in the "Bring 'em on" tone.

No doubt, hisitory will put dubya down as one of the worst US presidents. The guy is beyond stupid, totally inarticulate, without gravitas, no intellect, emotionally immature. Which is why is so popular with the rabble sheeple.

We know why the rich + corps like him. Follow the tax-cut money.

You will notice the quote was "IF HE WAS".

I will ask you a question. "If the man was convicted in a court of law of deliberately ordering the slaguther of a school full of children, does he deserve to die?"

[RandomGuy]

On to the thread's original premise:

Some sanity has finally crept into Bush foreign policy. His short-sighted blunderings have cost us immesurably. It is a pity that it took him 6 years to finally get some glimmering of reality.

How many people have had to and will die in the future for Bush's mistakes? Time will tell.

[boutons_]

"does he deserve to die?"

Sure, death, but the death penalty, in so many other cases, has been erroneous, so I say death or life/no parole.

And why children? what it it were just the russian opera house affair, and only 300 adults had died. doee he get a break for not kiling children. child, adult, old person, killing a human, killing 30 humans, it doesn't matter about their ages.

The Chechens attacking the school is a Russian internal affair. dubya has no right passing judgement on such an affair. He should STFU about other countries internal affairs that have nothing to do with the USA, since he s up with his mouth so much.

Here is dubya pandering to the lowest common denominator, talking about vengeance, justified killing, the kind of stuff that really turns on the red-staters.