Once again, the Churchill from west Texas turns into Chamberlain

Remember George W. Bush, leader and spokesman of the “great ideological struggle of the 21st century,” the war in which only complete victory for our side is acceptable, the war against, uh, Islamic Fasc … uh, terror, uh, whatever? Well, readers of VFR are all familiar by now with the Method of George: imperious, sweeping messianic utterances, which rouse his conservative supporters to Molly Bloomian cries of Yes, Yes!, combined with (mostly) dhimmi-like policies.

However, it’s not only in the war against, uh, whatever, that we see the Method of George at work. See what Anne Bayefsky writes about his positions on the UN, linked at Melanie Phillips’s website:

The real surprise of the day, however, was President George W. Bush. Last year at this time the president issued a list of reforms he expected from the U.N. in the near future: a new human-rights body which didn’t count abusers among its members, a comprehensive treaty against terrorism, meaningful institutional reforms in the area of oversight, accountability, efficiency. Not one of those demands has been met, but instead of issuing a failing grade, the president said nothing at all about U.N. reform. On Iran, the most he could muster was ‘Iran must abandon its nuclear-weapons ambitions.’ No talk of sanctions. No mention of consequences for Iran’s obvious refusal to abandon those ambitions. On Hamas he said ‘the world is waiting to see whether the Hamas government will…pursue an extremist agenda.’ Waiting to see? Just how many rocket attacks, kidnappings, speeches inciting racial hatred and violence, or murders does it take be an extremist? And on the Palestinian-Israeli front he said ‘the Palestinian people have suffered from…the daily humiliation of occupation’—the exact language of…yes, Kofi Annan.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 22, 2006 12:06 AM | Send