Do President George W. Bush, and the handlers who craft his public statements, simply make this shit up as they go along?

The president of the United States is without question the most powerful man in the world; a person whose every utterance is pored over by analysts as scrupulously as any tea leaf or mystic utterance, picked clean of all possible interpretations each news cycle. But once again last week, in the full glare of the world stage, the world was left wondering: is there any there there?

It's not just that Bush's policies make no sense in the outside world--though that's a problem, too. There's no internal logic, either. This time, the ridiculousness was Bush's pledge during his South Korea tour stop, in the face of unrelenting local public and political hostility toward Bush's "axis of evil" saber-rattling, that his government has no intention of actually attacking or invading North Korea--a country pathetic enough to have made the White House's publicly trumpeted short list of harmless patsies that can be safely obliterated in a week or two.

In politics, alas, as in nature, everything is connected to everything else. And particularly in an era of global 24-hour satellite news, every comment gets beamed everywhere else. Demagoguery no longer stops at the border.

So, about all those reiterations of the axis theme over the past month--you know, the ones where Bush insisted that where our hapless trio of evil feebs is concerned, "all options are on the table." Was all that just for domestic consumption? (Here's Dubya in the back room with South Korean president Kim Dae Jung: "No no no, Kim--or is it Dae? Damn, I can never keep you people's names straight! All that stuff about our reserving the right to use tactical nukes because North Korea might have weapons of mass destruction--that was just to get those last five points of approval rating! Heck, me and Kim--I mean Jong Il--we have a golf date next Thursday!")

Or now that the US has ruled out doing the only thing it knows how to do, was the "axis" ploy just that, a negotiating ploy vis-a-vis dictators, similar to Reagan's "evil empire" leading up to arms cutbacks with the Soviets--in which case, was the backlash throughout Asia and the world simply an unforeseen (though entirely predictable) side effect? And why aren't the Bushites negotiating anywhere else? Or did the White House figure that the rest of the world would figure Dubya was a crazed madman, but thought it would work to America's advantage to be thought of as ruled by unpredictable fanatics? (In which case, what about being the world's beacon for freedom and democracy? Was that never true, or do we elect madmen, or are we trying to shed that democracy image so as to disinterest future terrorists?)

Or does the White House simply not care what the rest of the world thinks, in which case, why back down this week? And if North Korea is no longer the threat to build weapons of mass destruction we heard about endlessly last week, why in hell are we continuing to spend billions on National Missile Defense to allegedly protect ourselves from the now-obsolete threat?

And so on. You get the idea.

One could apply the same Bush illogic domestically, if our supine media were so inclined. For example, take the Bush gem in the same speech--explaining why he thinks Pyongyang is still evil--that "Korean children should never starve while a massive army is fed."

Oh, really? Well, then, how 'bout American children? Plenty of them go to bed hungry--levels of hunger and malnutrition among American children and the elderly, particularly in communities of color, are scandalous for such a wealthy nation. Mr. Bush just fed Congress a budget with staggeringly large military spending increases while continuing to starve federal social spending. What about our children? Or is the catch that Bush doesn't believe in feeding our army, either--US servicemen still get shockingly poor wages--so much as in feeding military contractors (and campaign contributors)? Or is the catch that Bush prefers that Korean conscripts starve to death, too?

It's an endless game, having nothing to do with analyzing Dubya's garbled syntax and everything to do with the reckless use of sound bites that sounded good at the time. So, while US media effuses over Dubya's "de-escalation" of North Korea-bashing, and the censorship of his talk in Beijing, in Asia the wonderment was that Bush would be so rude (politeness is a Big Deal in East Asia) as to proclaim America's greatness and his host's failings in their presence at all. It was, well, boorish. America hadn't a clue.

Ditto for the embarrassingly proud announcement that America would lie to the world, as it has already done to itself, where Matters of Evil are concerned. (See this issue's "Eat these Shorts" for more on this topic.) The wonder wasn't that the US was insulting friend and enemy alike, but that the leadership of the world's self-assessed Greatest Country could be so fucking clueless as to brag about it.

The Bush foreign policy thus far, excepting its disengagement with global treaties and the Middle East, doesn't really look that different from what Al Gore would have done. We would surely have gotten something similar to the War On Terrorism, and the same military spending hikes; the same geopolitical game-playing substituting for an actual, effective effort to thwart terror; the same cynical promotion of elite economic interests at the expense of the very ideals America claims to champion. Displacing the Taliban wasn't notably messier than what the Democrats would've done--maybe less so, given the perceived Demo need to prove themselves sufficiently pro-military.

The difference, under Bush, is that in the process of pursuing America's unchanging, self-serving goals, he's pissed off most of the world in new and startling ways. Perhaps, in the end, this is a good thing--with sufficient outrage, more of the world might band together and stand up to the American Empire, a humanitarian intervention at least as justified as any America has tried recently.

But that's a longer-term concern. It's the short term that's worrisome--not Bush's hopefully short single term, but the number of people that might potentially die at any time because Dubya or his handlers have thinked up some clever new thing. Stupid speeches can be "clarified" or retracted. Bombs can't.