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He's right though. This sort of thing matters in foreign affairs. When Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers, it made the Soviets sit up and take notice--this guy was serious, and tough. Because GW Bush and his baby brother backed down from a dispute with a piddly-assed local judge when they could have used their power to save a life that they had committed to save, it shows them as timid in a way that will give our enemies will hope. "Maybe", they will think, "Bush isn't so tough. He does ignore what he wants to do if he fears a backlash in our friend the media. We just need to threaten something that causes him the same fear, and he will back down."

Bush has not wavered in the war on terror yet. But wavering on the duty of a President to protect the life of our citizens is a bad sign that he is capable of wavering in the right circumstances. He has lost some face. That's why his approval ratings are down, it's because conservatives are unhappy, not because moderates are. That's also why the approval ratings are ultimately worthless in connection with national politics--conservatives will still vote GOP for the most part with only a few disillusioned souls staying away from the polls.

Bold, decisive action shocks the body politic when it happens, and then when everyone sees a confident leader doing what he knows is right, and what turns out to be right, they will follow, and eventually, they will call that leader "great". Bush, for all the success in the Middle East of late, ought to remember the lessons of Reagan, Roosevelt (Teddy) and Lincoln, not accept the confines that liberal orthodoxy attempts to place him in.