Go West, TIME, go West

Today the editors at Investor’s Business Daily say most of what needs to be said about Time’s cover story calling President Bush’s foreign policy initiatives failures and ridiculing him personally by characterizing him as a little figure who’s covered by a huge cowboy hat that leaves only his boots showing.

IBS begins it takedown of Time :

Has the Bush administration implicitly acknowledged the failure of its simplistic "cowboy diplomacy"? Time magazine thinks so, but don't take a cover story as gospel. […]

Time's editorial theologians build their case predictably: "A grinding and unpopular war in Iraq, a growing insurgency in Afghanistan, an impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions, brewing war between Israel and the Palestinians — the litany of global crises would test the fortitude of any president."

There's a bit of schadenfreude and much faux sympathy in such journalistic stage-setting. Time's editors long ago abandoned the "American Century" vision of the magazine's founder, Henry Luce, who proposed a U.S. foreign policy that evangelized for democracy and freedom — which, like Bush's, too easily has been belittled by aspiring cosmopolitans as a schoolboy's "cowboy" fantasy.

Here's the mistake of these would-be sophisticates, itself touching in its simplistic misreading of history: They imagine "cowboy" to be a pejorative word, a caricature of a trigger-happy loner.

It's not. The word springs not only from America's best sensibilities but also from its inescapable world position. The U.S. remains the indispensable nation, the font of liberty and democracy.

Where Bush critics see a disastrous "go it alone" approach, wiser heads understand the need to assert leadership. And it is a canard that the administration has forsaken "coalition-building," that touchstone of liberal foreign policy. In Iraq specifically, the U.S. has led a multinational coalition, citing resolutions the United Nations enacted but showed no stomach for enforcing.

If there's an iconic moment in the legend of the West, it's when Gary Cooper, as the marshal in "High Noon," fails to rally the townspeople as they await the arrival of a murderous gang. Only when the lawman acts "unilaterally" do the citizens overcome their cowardice and restore the peace. […]

A long slog does not mean failure, even if journalistic rustlers rush to brand it as such in the administration's rawhide. A rattlesnake may spook a horse, the chuck wagon might bust a spoke, but that doesn't mean the drive can't be completed. […]

Bellicosity from North Korea, which Bush identified as part of an "axis of evil" shortly after 9-11, has persuaded Japan to seek a "cowboy" posture on our model. In 2003, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, as assistant defense secretary, quietly initiated a 13-nation program to keep missile propellants out of Pyongyang's hands.

The successful covert program also denied Kim Jong-Il revenues from ballistic missile sales and blocked China from selling deadly chemicals to its little communist brother. Time magazine missed that story. You had to go to the Times of London to find it.

Cowboy diplomacy? Let's have more of it.

Time has missed quite a lot in the past too. It was a constant critic of President Reagan’s initiatives to strengthen America’s military and to pressure the old Soviet Union in order to bring down that “evil empire.” Time didn’t like those policies.

Come to think of it, partners, weren’t those Easterners at Time part of that MSM crowd that used to call Reagan a cowboy?

Some things don’t seem to change, do they?

Recommendations for Time:

Hire fewer leftists and liberals.

Stop writing the kind of stuff we expect to come out of the DNC's spin office.

Don'tx ridicule the President as a person. That's nasty.

And get out and spend some time with cowboys. Cowgirls too. The ones I’ve met have been wonderful people.
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http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&issue=20060710&view=1