Juan Cole today:

Informed Comment
Bush is on vacation, his favorite place to be during a major crisis. The August retreat is the only open admission he makes that Cheney and Rumsfeld are actually running the country, and he just doesn’t need to be in his office. The only difference between his stonewalling of Lebanon and the way he let New Orleans drown is that he has put away the banjo this summer, at least in public view. He had someone tie a necktie on him and stopped manically clearing brush for long enough to come out with Condi and hold a press conference. He lied, saying that no one wants to see the violence continue. He wants to see the violence continue. Otherwise he would insist on a ceasefire. You see, if you don’t have a ceasefire, the violence continues. If you oppose a ceasefire, you are saying you want the violence to continue. He does.

I’ve never seen a more inept, “get me outta here” performance than Bush did on the Press Conference yesterday (or whatever that was). Of course, he doesn’t have a pot to piss in. He has no means to articulate anything that makes any sense about this. He’s a disgrace. But mostly because of the chaos and evil resulting from his clueless responses to things (based on the advice of his clueless, arrogant, band of international outlaws, the neocon gang. )

Was it just me, or did it look like Bush was sweating bullets and scared to death?

Nope, it wasn’t just me:

Worst Press Conference Ever: Does Bush understand his own foreign policy? By Fred Kaplan
George W. Bush’s news conference on Monday was the most dismaying spectacle put on by a top American official since Condoleezza Rice’s news conference two and a half weeks earlier.

Both the president and the secretary of state were addressing the Israel-Lebanon conflict and why they favored peace but not right away.

Looks like a lot of others were as dismayed by what they saw as I was……not that he was really bad, but dismayed at how bad he can get. The answer to Kaplan’s subtitle question (Does Bush understand his own foreign policy?) is that he doesn’t have one. It’s someone else’s. (Which in no way makes it less inept. Actually , they have the best possible person delievring it in a manner deserving of the policy itself.)