Smells Like a Cowpie; Looks Like a Cowpie; 'tis a Cowpie

In one of the better articles I have read in a while, Philip James wrote a great piece for Guardian today. In it, he writes of the wishful thinking in the Bush camp hoping for comparisons between the current President and Reagan. It's very clever to point out that all the things that Reagan wanted to seem like, yet not act like, Bush is seeming and acting like. For example, Reagan's "walk softly and carry a big stick" or that "Reagan may have sounded like a cowboy, but he acted like a diplomat," yet Bush walks loudly and carries a stick and he sounds like a cowboy and acts like a cowboy. There were declarations of evil by both, threats, yet Reagan changed the world (communism - wink wink) without ever firing a shot.

Reagan spent the Soviets into submission with the backing of the greatest coalition the world has ever known, NATO, and eventually ended half a century of world-threatening enmity at the Reykjavik summit without a shot being fired.

The pretender to Reagan's legacy sounded like a cowboy when he lashed out at the "axis of evil" in his 2002 state of the union address and then proceeded to act like one. He had been preparing for war for two years before he made the speech.

While Reagan deftly used diplomacy to dismantle the Soviet Union, Bush scoffed at the notion in his rush to war, and in so doing dismantled relations with NATO allies that had taken decades to cement.

While the Soviet Union's expansionism was axiomatic, its repression of freedom irrefutable, Iraq's evil was contained. Its threat to the world was an invention in the service of political ambition, a dangerous diversion from the stated goal, the global war on terror.

Since Bush is inviting the comparison to Reagan, lets indulge him further. The results are not favourable when you stand the great communicator next to Mr Malaprop. Reagan's one-liners are legendary; they filled a book with Bush's garbled utterances.

Reagan's optimistic oratory had a way of carrying even an audience ideologically opposed to him. Watching a Bush speech, on the other hand, is like watching a car crash in slow motion. You know something horrible is about to happen to the English language, but you cannot look away.