The Bush foreign policy approach: "nuance."

Where do we begin with this pile of putziness?

JOE GANDELMAN looks at Republican pundits deserting Bush, which does seem to be a phenomenon. Bush -- who, as I've said before, has always been politically weak, just stronger than Kerry or Gore -- is in the "sweet spot" on the war, fighting hard enough to anger the antiwar folks but not hard enough to please the prowar folks. This might argue that Bush is getting it right, but I suspect not. If you're going to fight a war, you should probably fight it full bore or not at all, raising the troubling possibility that both sets of critics are right simultaneously. But perhaps a nuanced approach is called for.

First of all, the fact that Republican pundits like George Will and William F. Buckley are finally fed up with Bush doesn't seem to be anything. It's a fact. And the reason they're fed up is because Bush is incompetent.

Second, Bush is politically weak compared to Al Gore and John Kerry? Huh? Bush's only advantage against those two was political. He's a son of a former President, he had a juggernaut political appartus behind him, had unprecedented sums of money from political connections in 2000, had Karl Rove, and he's a significantly more disciplined campaigner than both Gore and Kerry. For all his flaws, Bush avoided a major gaffe in 2004 by staying on message. Kerry blew the election when, going totally off script at the Grand Canyon, he said he'd authorize force again even if he knew Iraq didn't have WMD. Game over.

And what is this "war" that Putz keeps talking about? The civil war that's going on in Iraq? How does Bush fight that "full bore"? The "full bore" approach has been tried now for several years--Fallujah comes to mind--and it never killed the insurgency. What's the "full bore" solution to stop the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite? Bomb Baghdad? Does he mean the "war on terror"? How do you fight that "full bore" by simultaneously funding and fueling terrorism with oil at record levels and reckless, military misadventures?

Finally, whatever you want to call the $500 billion war in Iraq, that's cost 2600 American and 40,000 Iraqi lives, "nuanced" would probably not be near the top of the list.