George W. Bush was famously untravelled as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency. He had spent more time hanging out in bars just over the border in Juarez than hanging with diplomats anywhere. In 2000, conservatives found this lack of care about foreign nations, U.S. interventions, and foreign people to be “charming,” sort of a poke-in-the-eye to the Rhodes scholar-rich Democratic Party who worried about things like peace in Palestine and getting the North Koreans to agree to stop building nuclear devices (who could be afraid of a bad-hair guy like Kim Jong-Il anyway?).
That was then. Now they desperately have to find something about Barack Obama to complain about. Never mind that Obama has spent more time overseas and in Iraq than George W. Bush, still. While John McCain can get his information in a one-day, flack-jacketed, armored personnel-carrier tour of Iraq, Obama’s two days isn’t enough to please Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit nor Jim Geraghty at National Review Online.
Observation: Conservatives are really, really desperate to find mud on a nice guy; Reynolds and others really are losing badly on issues, to make so much of so little. Also, William F. Buckley has been dead for just over three months, and NR has already gone to hell, deteriorating to a barking-dog cutout of its former intellectual heft.
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 