People who despise G.W. Bush sneeringly refer to him as a “cowboy.” Actually, the term fits him and T. Blair quite nicely, although it’s hard to imagine the Brit in a roundup scene of “Lonesome Dove.” But G.W. could pull it off easily. He hath that lean look, the thin-lipped smirk and that “aw shucks, ma’am” manner. Four letter words suit him just fine…Mr. Dillon. Only two famous cowboys could have matched G.W. for simple talk. Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood. But the three have more in common—much more. As Marshal Will Kane in “High Noon,” Cooper single-handedly faced down a bunch of killer outlaws as the townspeople, cowards every one, hid behind shuttered windows. They half-wanted Kane to fail to assuage their massive guilt. In “High Plains Drifter,” The Stranger, aka Clint, rides into the miserable town of Lago and (for a price) saves the place from evil thugs. The tale is as old as time. Go to any schoolyard at recess and you’ll find the resident bully who never stops abusing the weak until somebody takes him down. Dirty Harry knew the score. So did Charles Bronson who looked evil in the eye and saw it for what it was. Evidently, Hollywood doesn’t believe in the rightness of its own scripts. It would rather stand alongside the pacifists, the PC crowd and the CLU to protect a beast from “moralists” like G.W. Oh, well, nobody likes a do-gooder from Texas. And who really cares if a dictator butchers a couple of million people. It’s his country. If the Iraqi people don’t care enough to rise up, maybe they deserve to be thrown into plastic shredders, gassed and tortured. Cutting out tongues and hanging up menustrating women by their feet is a bit extreme, but it was, after all, during peacetime. As long as death and mutilation don’t occur during war, they don’t seem to have the same appeal. At least, it’s hard to recall how many of our idealistic citizens jammed the streets of New York, Washington and San Francisco to protest minor episodes like acid baths and random beheadings. Ethnic cleansing and genocide does keep the world population in check. Yes indeed. In the final analysis, who is the U.S. to pass judgment anyway—a country that practiced slavery at its birth and even now allows a private golf club to discriminate against women. For shame. We have a lot to learn. Maybe the protestors are trying to tell us we actually deserved 9-11. Perhaps they believe if we turn the other cheek, the bad people will go away. Instead of resorting to violence, God forbid, they will want former Presidents Carter and Clinton to travel the world to apologize for America’s bullying excesses and to search for diplomatic compromises. Meanwhile, others—many others—would rather put their lives, and the world’s fate, in the hands of a cowboy.