George Bush Abroad, Conservatism at Home, and Presidents at Funerals

Over at Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria gives us this disturbing column about George Bush in the world. Zakaria claims that China's president is better received around the world than hyper-secure, constantly jeered, and publically avoidant George W. Bush. If he's right, then democracy has a problem that no containment policy can solve. Looking at the post-WWII period of American democracy, and now, Zakaria says, "We have fallen far from that model if the head of the Chinese Communist Party is seen as presenting the world with a more progressive agenda than the president of the world’s leading democracy." Amen.

Domestically, fiscal conservatives are understandably in a bit of a froth over what the "party of the responsibility" has been up to for the last three years. George Will has a few things to say about the 'evolution' of conservatism in America. Who knew that even the Republicans were socialists? Oh right, Michael Moore said as much in Dude, Where's My Country.

And finally a topic near and dear to my heart, Charles Krauthammer gives us an explanation of why Bush has yet to attend a single funeral of the Iraqi war dead. He makes a convincing case that it isn't about callousness or even being too busy raising funds, but rather the need to project strength in what is essentially a battle of wills. I hope that he's right, because with family in the service I have not been very thrilled with the cowboy act, while Bush turns around and pockets a couple of million dollars every few days for re-election.

Krauthammer does not deal with the relevance of the Iraq war in the context of the war on terror in this piece, though I'll do some looking and see what I can come up with from him.