Notes & Asides

Dear Mr. Buckley: European newspapers have taken to caricaturing President Bush as a reckless cowboy who rides into town, gets drunk, and shoots the place up.

However, there are different images to conjure up when thinking of the American cowboy: creaking saddles, the smell of horses, lowing cattle on wide-open plains under snowcapped mountains, a taciturn man who minds his own business and is loyal, dependable, and respectful to women, with an innate sense of right and wrong. He is Shane, the Virginian, and Monte Walsh—the 19th-century American Galahad. Europeans know these images well, but to the anti-Bush crowd they are inconvenient. Much of the world out there looks a great deal like the townspeople in High Noon, leaving Gary Cooper to fight for his life, his wife, and, naturally, the safety of the town . . . alone.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

National Review

Dear Mr. Buckley: European newspapers have taken to caricaturing President Bush as a reckless cowboy who rides into town, gets drunk, and shoots the place up.

However, there are different images to conjure up when thinking of the American cowboy: creaking saddles, the smell of horses, lowing cattle on wide-open plains under snowcapped mountains, a taciturn man who minds his own business and is loyal, dependable, and respectful to women, with an innate sense of right and wrong. He is Shane, the Virginian, and Monte Walsh—the 19th-century American Galahad. Europeans know these images well, but to the anti-Bush crowd they are inconvenient. Much of the world out there looks a great deal like the townspeople in High Noon, leaving Gary Cooper to fight for his life, his wife, and, naturally, the safety of the town . . . alone.