BDS

Right wingers have a term for those who find the policies of this White House intolerable and the behaviour of the boy king insufferable. Bush Derangement Syndrome, or BDS, as in-the-know lunatics jauntily call it. But there is another kind of BDS, a syndrome directly linked to some heretofore unaccountable ability to ignore the damage that Bush has done, both here and abroad. Condoleezzaa Rice, after weeks of dormancy, has managed to peel back her sleepy lids and show the world that she too suffers from an opposite variant of Bush Derangement Syndrome. It is one that Bush himself has frequently displayed as each new or ongoing disaster apparently convinces him and Rice that Bush is on the path toward amassing a record that will one day be viewed glowingly. Its the here and now within which we are all simply too benighted to see the brilliance of the Bush's bold vision.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says history will remember President Bush's foreign policy favorably despite current troubles in Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the Middle East.

Her reasons for this notion are that before Bush moved to fore, it was a world gone or going mad.

Six years ago ... it wasn't a very nice world. Al-Qaida was preparing to attack the twin towers, Pakistan was allied with the Taliban, Afghanistan was the base from where al-Qaida was going to operate, the Israelis and Palestinians had given up," she said.

"The Palestinians had walked away from a chance for a Palestinian state, launched the second intifada; (Israel) elected Ariel Sharon who basically said there will never be a Palestinian state and there will be a greater Israel; the North Koreans were cheating on a deal that they had just signed; China and others were indifferent; Iran was cheating on the IAEA out of sight and Saddam Hussein was shooting at our pilots in the no-fly zone and making a mockery of the oil-for-food program and corruption was running rampant in that program."

As far as anyone can tell and except for the paean to the "twin towers," not only has none of this changed under Bush's foreign policy, much of it has gotten considerably worse. With three failing or failed wars either directly or indirectly under his foreign policy belt, millions displaced, hundreds of thousands dead, the Darfur disaster continuing apace, the Taliban and Pakistan still firmly embraced, North Korea now in possession of nuclear weapons, and Iraq turned into a terrorist training ground, Rice's claim that, the prior to all this, we were living in a "worse world" than what we have now displays a level of derangement that Bush himself hasn't even shown.