HADLEY: BUSH WILL NOT DELIVER

DELIBERATE DISTORTION takes many forms. You could obsess on one part of the world obsessively.  And totally forget about the rest.  You could be so “focused” on one country that people will not notice you seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder on just about everything else.

BUSH WILL NOT DELIVER anything but little sound bites, perhaps hard to swallow.  Look for leftovers gone cold.  [story]

"I don't think there are going to be any headline breakthroughs," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley told reporters on Air Force One. "This is not a trip where the president has to come with a deliverable initiative." The main goal, he said in a separate briefing last week, is "to show the U.S. commitment to Asia as an area of our interest" and "to indicate clearly that the president knows the United States has an important role to play in both the economic and security challenges in Asia and that he wants to play that role."

BUSH WANTS TO PLAY that role.  The problem with Bush is that he plays at everything. The WaPo goes with the headline: Bush Shifts Focus with Trip to Asia, which presumes he has a focus.  This has been your deliberate distortion for today. Thank you.  Go bless America.

OTHER VOICES IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY
BUSH IS NO CLINTON [Ipinions] After all, despite his domestic woes, Clinton was always adored abroad. By contrast, however, it seems Bush is as disliked and disrespected abroad as he is at home: where recent polls rated him as the most unpopular president in U.S. history (due in part to the growing disillusionment of many Americans with his administration - stemming from the bloody quagmire in Iraq and the upsetting suspicion that Bush misled them about his reasons for targeting Saddam.)
Moreover, even though this is a timely trip to escape political heat in Washington, it is most untimely for Bush to be risking what little remains of his international gravitas at this APEC summit. Because his gospel about the values of democracy and free trade is bound to fall on more deaf ears - given his spectacular failure to impress leaders in his own backyard with these values at the recent Summit of the Americas in Argentina.

THE HERETIK COULD NOT agree more.  While Clinton did have problems for coming across Lewinsky, he came across as serious across the world.  In contrast Bush just comes up short.  Live by the sound bite, Bush, get chewed up by small ideas.