Is Bush a Manchurian candidate?

Remember when the Bush administration rode into town and was determined to do everything different than those dirty hippies in the Clinton administration?

In addition to taking their eyes off the ball concerning terror – a Presidential Briefing titled "bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S?" Ehh, ignore it – they have apparently also managed to screw up the situation with North Korea.

The Clinton administration had a deal with the Koreans that stopped them from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for food and oil aid. The Bushies were sure that deal was being ignored by the Koreans so they promptly scrapped it.

Ooops.

Hard as it is to believe, I know, it turns out they have fucked up yet again:

“For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.

But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.

“The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizable arsenal if this had been handled differently,” a senior administration official said this week.”

So let me see if I have this straight: Clinton had got the Koreans to stop development of a nuclear weapons program. Bush was appointed President after losing the popular vote (I like to throw that fact in occasionally, just to remind everyone of how illegitimate this empty little suit of a man is) and proceeds to break the deal with the North Koreans, which spurs them to go ahead and actually develop nuclear weapons, which they tested a few months ago.

So to recap: Bush invades a country that did not have weapons of mass destruction, getting our troops caught in the middle of a bloody civil war now in its fourth year. Bush breaks off a working agreement with a madman dictator spurring him to develop nukes.

It's hard to believe any President could be so consistently incompetent. It almost seems like these foreign policy disasters are being done deliberately - as if Boy George is a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed by some enemy power to eventually assume the U.S. Presidency and then proceed to destroy this country, its reputation and its resources.

Except, of course, he never served overseas in the military, so unless the brainwashing happened in the wilds of Alabama, where Bush almost served out the terms of his National Guard service, I don't know when it could have happened?


Wait a minute. In the 1970s, Bush Sr. was U.S. Ambassador to China (no less). Bush Jr. presumably visited him when he was there. During one of those visits, could he have.....?