Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t

Colby Cosh:

For three years and change, the man who pledged a “more humble [American] foreign policy” has been raked over the coals for failing to adhere to that promise, despite the unusually strong reasons (e.g., the large ashen hole in the lower part of Manhattan) for a midterm course change. Now Bush has taken the first steps toward ceasing to guarantee, in toto, the defense of every other industrialized democracy in the known universe. And the man they were calling an imperialist yesterday is now instantly tarred as an isolationist. Do we need a new word here? Isoperialist? Impolationist?