Froomkin has a very interesting question in today's piece: Where's the cowboy talk now?

I want to share a little story with you. As a family therapist, I often worked with parents who were having behavioral problems with their young children. Despite some psychological theories, I always found it kinda silly to work with the children on their problems (except in certain kinds of circumstances, not relevent to this story). I used to work with parents to work with their kids to solve the presenting behavioral problem.

I had a standard warning when I would begin this process with a parent. I would warn them that if they were successful in the intervention, the child's behavior would get worse .... often much worse and would continue to deteriorate depending on how long the previous behavior was tolerated. Thus, changing the behavior of a two year old was significantly easier than of, say, a ten year old who had been successfully acting out for years. "It's gotta get worse before it'll get better" I would continually remind parents. "And you just have to stick it out and not take the bait to give in, or you're back where you started only worse."

Of course the purpose in this dynamic is for a child to test the changed environment .... to determine if the change is real, or just a temporary setback in trying to achieve their selfish needs through the path of least resistance ... old behavior. And often (too often), the parents would succumb to the setback which would mean that the next time, if there was a next time, their attempt to change their parenting would be met with much more resistance and would take longer to be successful (after all, the kid's testing of the change worked last time, right?)

Why am I telling you all this?

Because behavior modification is the same for adults, especially immature ones. The Republicans, and specifically the Bush administration, don't have the faintest f*&%king clue about it.

Bush's adventure in world politics has made the possibility of a major world conflict much more likely. Not because he's increased tension although that certainly has contributed. But rather because he has become an empty suit. Now, in order for the U.S. to contain Kim Jong Il, it's almost inevitable that we will have to intervene militarily (or someone will, i.e. China, Japan) in order to make the guy a believer. We've used bluster to set limits, Jong Il has tested them, and we've folded like a cheap tent (or more likely, like Barbara Bush). Short of military intervention, the child-like Kim will try to sell his nukes greatly increasing the real danger to the world community.

Future Presidents will have to clean-up the Bush mess. He's weakened our international credibility far more than the past Presidents during the Vietnam debacle. The first Gulf war was largely about re-establishing a credible military tool for use by the U.S. in world diplomacy. It's gone now, and it will take much to re-establish it including a likely war that is of greater consequence than the Iraq adventure.