NY Times: Bush Swagger Backfiring

The Times has gotten it right on Bush's mindless trash talking:

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Iraq war and President Bush’s with-us-or-against-us war on terrorism was supposed to frighten the bad guys so much that they wouldn’t dare cross the United States. But the opposite has happened. President Bush has squandered so much of America’s moral authority — not to mention our military resources — that efforts to shame or bully the right behavior from adversaries (and allies) sound hollow.

Now Mr. Bush is so confused about what to do next that he is asking himself questions at press conferences:

“I’ll ask myself a follow-up,” Mr. Bush said. “ ‘If that’s the case, why did you use military action in Iraq?’ And the reason why is because we tried the diplomacy.”

The North Korean hypocrisy is raising questions among Republicans running for re-election:

Demcrats have criticized him for rushing into a war with Iraq, which turned out not to have unconventional weapons, while not setting limits on North Korea, which declared this week that it had conducted its first nuclear test.

That the president himself raised and rejected this critique appears to reflect concern among Mr. Bush’s advisers that North Korea could be a political liability for Republicans, one that the president needed to confront directly with voters.