American President Pleads Guilty to Hopeless Idealism
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: June 18, 2008

LONDON

President Bush was in one of his oddly chipper moods when he arrived for
dinner with Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street on Sunday night.

Maybe he was excited by the prospect of sharing some Gloucestershire beef,
Yorkshire pudding and fruit trifle with a world leader more unpopular than
he is.

Maybe he was happy to be having dinner with Rupert Murdoch and a covey of
British historians who might agree with his contention to London 's Observer
that "there's no such thing as objective short-term history." Just in case,
though, the group dwelled on the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and didn't
talk about the 21st. And presumably, over the 1934 brandy that W. eschewed,
the historian

Simon Schama did not repeat his 2006 assessment that the president was an
"absolute [expletive] catastrophe" or his analysis that long before Mr. Bush's
militant missionary work in the Middle East, Europe had regarded the moral
rhetoric of America as a cover for self-interest.

Maybe W. was buoyant because his motorcade evaded the protestors holding up
signs that said "War Criminal," and he was too far away to hear the
withering scorn of a BBC correspondent stationed on Downing Street , warning
that the British public wouldn't stand for it if the prime minister greeted
the toxic president too warmly. Britain is still smarting about being cast
as poodle to W.'s pit bull, and the correspondent sneeringly recalled "the
Colgate moment" when Tony Blair and George Bush bonded over their use of the
same toothpaste.

Or perhaps after working with Torquemada Cheney all these years, W. simply
feels more at home in a monarchy. At the end of dinner he posed under a
portrait of Elizabeth I in the drawing room and gayly promised: "This is
going to be my White House Christmas card."

If Mr. Brown had any thought of promoting himself as the anti-poodle with
some arm's length body language, W. swiftly disabused him. He spread his
wingspan to draw in Gordon and Sarah, and then clasped Gordon so heartily
around the shoulders that the Brit was forced to grab W.'s waist in a shy
embrace as they entered the building.

As W. told The Observer: "It's convenient to say, you know, 'warmonger,'
'religious zealot,' 'poodle' - I mean, these are just words that people love
to toss around foolishly."

Poppy Bush was often compared to Bertie Wooster, and W. seems to have found
his own stiff-backed Jeeves. Mr. Brown agreed to send more troops to
Afghanistan , put more sanctions on Iran and decide on Iraq troop
withdrawals based on conditions on the ground.

Quentin Letts pointed out in The Daily Mail that when W. touched Gordon, the
prime minister would "recoil like a novice nun at first and later smile in
terror," and when W. said he had no problem with Brownie on Iraq, "You could
almost see Mr. Brown thinking: 'Oh, Gawd! There go another few thousand
votes.' "

Asked by The Observer reporter about W.M.D. in Iraq , W. replied: "Still
looking for them," sparking a strange moment of levity. Mr. Bush continued:
"We didn't realize, nor did anybody else, that Saddam Hussein felt like he
needed to play like he had weapons of mass destruction. It may have been,
however, that in his mind all this was just a bluff."

Yeah, who could have ever guessed that a wily, deceitful and debilitated
Arab dictator might huff and puff, not wanting rivals in the neighborhood to
know the weapons cupboard was bare? Maybe some of those psychologists
specializing in boastful, malignant narcissists and Middle East cultural
experts working in our $40 billion-a-year intelligence units should have
been able to figure it out?

The Daily Mail's front page on Monday juxtaposed a picture of the Union
Jack-draped coffins of five British paratroopers killed in Afghanistan,
lined up on the tarmac before being flown home, and a picture of W. and
Laura landing at Heathrow.

Mr. Bush, who said he's going to put a "Freedom Institute" in his
presidential library, told reporters at a press conference with Mr. Brown
that "one of the things that I will leave behind is a multilateralism to
deal with tyrants, so problems can be solved diplomatically." W. confessed
only to "hopeless idealism" on Iraq and Afghanistan .

He said "history will judge whether or not, you know, more troops were
needed earlier, troops could have been positioned here better or not." But
going in, he said, was right despite the "doubters." "There is some who say
that perhaps freedom is not universal," he asserted, adding that he rejected
as elitist the notion that "maybe it's only, you know, white-guy Methodists
who are capable of self-government."

If there's one thing W. and Cheney have proved, beyond a sliver of a shadow
of a doubt, it's that at least two white-guy Methodists are not capable of
self-government.