And then there is...Korea.
Last night the President also figuratively threw up his hands in frustration declaring North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons to be a "regional" issue.
He TRIED to sound sincere and engaged...and tried and tried. Nevertheless the net effect communicated as nothing has before the utter bankruptcy of Bush's neither "talk nor fight" approach to Pyongyang. The initiative completely passed to Komrade Kim at about 8:45pm EST last night...how long he will have it or what he will do with it is unknown.
By stressing the "regional" nature of the crisis Bush has rationalized his own hapless passive-aggressive "policy" in a manner that brings us closer to either war or abject humiliation on the Korean peninsula.
Gamely Bush listed the "other countries" who have an alleged vested interested in keeping nukes out of Pyongyang's mitts , but as we all know Colin Powell was treated like a red-headed stepchild on his tour of the region last week.
In other words, we are waiting like sheep in the slaughterhouse for someone else to get a policy that not craven by definition.
This country is bound by oath and treaty to the defense of something like four functioning democracies in this region. If we don't start handling this situation right the ineffable quality of our security guarantees to those countries will become fatally compromised. Given the Powell's reception last week it looks like that security guarantee is devaluing by the hour.
Security never vanishes, but countries that can't provide it for themselves will inevitably shop for it from other sources...sources within the region, sources that might not be democratically oriented.
It's just amazing to me that a so-called movement conservative with all the usual national security fixations DOESN'T realize this.
And why why why do I have the sinking suspicion that if North Korea attacks and conquers the South, all Bush will do is bray long and loud over the dire necessity to speed up the Strategic Defense Initiative? (or whatever they calling it today?)
Let us hope South Korea has a President with a plan, cause' his American counterpart seems to have nothing at all on tap.
Frankly Bush is looking more and more like Allen Drury's sinister caricature of Presidential timidity and indecisiveness "Edward M. Jason" the hapless Commander-in-Chief in his novel "Come Nineveh, Come Tyre" last of the rightical chic "Advise and Consent" series.
Of course, Allen was good movement conservative, his Jason is a paragon of liberalism whom the Russians relentlessly bully and intimidate into abject surrender over the course of some 473 stultifying pages. "The Reds" are ably assisted by their domestic servitors including a ruthless amoral U.S. Senator whose police state tactics nicely prefigure John Ashcroft.
Of course "Come Nineveh, Come Tyre" is fiction, a CONSERVATIVE U.S. President would never preside over the disintegration of American security guarantees in Asia would he? A CONSERVATIVE U.S. President by nature can't be timid, indecisive, cowardly, opportunistic, callow, and easily manipulated by brutes and thugs on his own staff?
Can he?
:)
I've always had a perverse liking for Allen Drury...despite his ponderous comic book dialogue he was a Samuel Johnson compared to today's semi-literate freeper trogs like Tom Clancy.
Sick
Demented
Typical