Moral: Don't trust the pre-release marketing hype, including author interviews. I'll wait for the reviews.

As a most definite "liberal" myself, what I want most from the War on Terror is Bin Laden off the scene and his organization destroyed. What I want next is a foreign policy that does not encourge its recrudescence. We have neither at the moment.

I look forward to reading "Imperial Hubris" because it apparently details why George W. Bush has simply flat out failed to do this when it has been fully within his power to do so, or at least to start the process.

I have other reasons for disliking both the ideology, the "theology" (if you can call it that), and the style of George W., but they are irrelevant to the simple question of whether he has been fighting the War On Terror in a way which is inane and ineffective. I think he has, Anonymous appears to agree with me, and most of the "conservative" element hasn't the face to even consider the question because they are so fantasy of themselves as the only truly patriotic Americans.

I repeat, what I want is effective policy. We are not getting it and have not been getting it since we flubbed the invasion of Afghanistan. What, I wonder, do my "conservative" fellow Americans, really want?

Nobody currently in a position of any significant influence, of either party, is proposing to do anything like what Anonymous proposes. The Clinton administration "flubbed" this for eight years despite repeated al Qaeda attacks. The problem is that the American political consciousness is simply not ready to fight barbarism with barbarism.

Since the battle of Tora Bora we've been treated to a spectacular--and largely useless--display of American ordinance (remember "shock and awe"?) and bumbling officiousness in a country that was mostly irrelevant to the major threat we faced while the leader of that major threat has constantly slipped through our fingers and his organization has reformed worldwide.

This is the sort of thing which is fine as a treat on the 4th of July, with sailors standing at attention under a banner of "Mission Accomplished" but it is hardly effective and coherant foreign policy.

Nor is it effective military policy--any careful and objective examination of our current readiness posture will show you that we are now in no position to do what we did in Iraq anywhere else and we won't be able to do it for a very long time, despite having the largest and best equipped military machine on the planet. And what have we accomplished with it?

It is quite possible that Bill Clinton could have done more to fight terrorism. It is certain that George W. Bush could have done a lot less than he has in the right places (like the Pashtun borderlands) instead of the wrong places, and fought it a lot more effectively. And he would have had plenty to spare to continue to fight it with, which he now does not.

Bill, of course, has moved on from Government to a highly successful career as an author and public speaker. A career in which, in my opinion, he deserves every dime he makes, given the scurrulous and gratuitous abuse he had to endure from the party of druggies like Rush Limbaugh, sex-club athletes like Jack Ryan and his wife, and corrupt anti-democracy bosses like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. And Clinton still remains The Big Dawg wherever he goes.

I notice as well, the new Bush/Cheney slogan on the ad in the upper left corner: This One's For The Gipper. And all I can say is that it speaks volumes of the utter lack of any positive accomplishment on the part of Republican government in the last four years despite every advantage of strict party discipline, legislative majorities, and a sitting President.

The Gipper has ridden into the sunset, waving his cowboy hat, with even his enemies at least silent in the face of his final journey, and with the vast good wishes of his friends.

Oh, I forgot, George deposed and captured Saddam Hussein--after Daddy had defeated him and rendered him (we now know) internationally harmless.

This is a positive accomplishment, though I'm not that sure that it was really worth the tens of billions of dollars it has cost. Everybody else seems to have forgotten it too, or at least are not inclined to trot it out for comparison to a truly major accomplishment, like the fall of the Soviet Union. A rare display of good sense so close to the Gipper's funeral.

But be that as it may, let's just tuck my partisan prejudice under my coat (don't worry, we just passed a Concealed Carry Law where I live) and ask the question straight:

Besides the capture of Saddam Hussein, just what are the accomplishments of George W. Bush as president, and how to they really measure up to the Gipper, Daddy, or even The Big Dawg?

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