You know the Bush administration is truly cycling off into space when Thomas Friedman, hardly a bleeding-heart liberal, is a clarion voice of reason.

He argues that Bill Clinton remains more popular around the world than the Bush regime, because Clinton represents “American optimism” — the earnest, kinda naive desire to make the rest of the world a better place. Okay, it’s easy to argue with that statement, but the thing I quite liked was Friedman’s neat description of just how peculiarly ugly the Bush folks seem:

Bill Clinton is viewed by the world as the epitome of American optimism — naïve optimism maybe, but optimism. And the Bush team — the President, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice (Colin Powell is an exception) — strike the world as cynical pessimists who believe only in power politics, much like 19th-century European statesmen. For the world, Bill Clinton is another J.F.K. and George Bush is another Thomas Hobbes, a man who, after witnessing Europe’s religious wars, became deeply pessimistic about human nature and concluded that only one law prevailed in the world: Homo Homini Lupus — every man is a wolf to every other man.