Gerard Baker: A callow cowboy stumbles

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed May 29 17:16:14 PDT 2002


Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
> This piece is remarkable not only for its juicy details but for its author -
> a confirmed anti-anti-American. He sounds genuinely appalled.

But see the last sentences:
>
> ---
> > In the end, painful though it is to admit it, this is Europe's problem,
> rather than Mr Bush's. The American president is not going to become
> suddenly a model of cosmopolitan sophistication, putting an urbane case for
> US conservatism as he sashays, Kennedy-like, through the drawing rooms of
> Europe. Europeans are just going to have to get over it and display the kind
> of sang-froid Mr Chirac so admirably demonstrated last Sunday.

In other words, Bush's (the US's) foreign policy is correct -- and if the Europeans don't like its wrappings they can damn well lump it. This seems to me as "callow" as any of Bush's "slips."

I still keep thinking now and then of the way Eisenhower made quite deliberate political capital of his [quite deliberarely assumed] face of public buffoonery.

Carrol



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