But despite the refreshing steadiness and lack of ostentation with which Bush is conducting his presidency, doubts linger about his preparation for the job. His conduct of foreign affairs has been at times dismayingly awkward. Reader mail about my mildly stated negative view of the administration's management of last month's China crisis was unprecedented in its virulence and one-sidedness: A majority of conservatives were apoplectic and irrationally, even misogynistically abusive while liberals, who strongly weighed in on cultural issues in the same column, were eerily silent about China. One can only conclude that the extreme right wing is infested with infantile personalities while American liberals, with their sentimental, nanny-state credo, are embarrassingly ill-prepared for the cruel complexities of geopolitics.

In a pressured overnight session one day after publicly resigning himself to a long wait, Bush signed off on an undignified, poorly written, sycophantish letter of apology to China for an accident that was no fault of the American military -- and we still don't have our reconnaissance plane back. What was the big rush, aside from domestic politics, to end the detention of the 24 crew members in China? They're all professionals, and while they were stringently interrogated, there was no evidence they were being mistreated. Making little visible effort to coordinate a response with our allies, the Bush administration seems to have sacrificed the nation's larger strategic interests for immediate political relief.

It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that Communist China is waiting for the optimal moment, in this decade or the next, to snatch back Taiwan, whose status as an independent nation it has never accepted. By hesitating, wavering, and then abruptly caving in to Beijing over the spy plane, the Bush administration may have signaled that the U.S. won't go to war over Taiwan -- a message further muddled by Bush's off-the-cuff remarks about the island last week, which seemed to indicate a change of established American policy but might just have been a slip of the tongue.

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While it's true (as Salon readers have tartly observed) that my biases as a humanities professor may be showing, I still maintain that basic command of language -- not at all the same thing as eloquence -- should be a minimal requirement for the presidency. When, in his mid-afternoon formal statement after China agreed to release the crew, Bush simply read a prepared text and took no press questions whatever, he undercut his loyal staff's vigorous claims that he had been deeply involved in every aspect of the negotiations. It certainly looked as if he couldn't trust himself to phrase things right at a delicate moment.

In other matters, I was shocked at last week's news that Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle will not be court-martialed for the February collision of his attack submarine, the USS Greenville, with the Japanese trawler Ehime Maru with the loss of 9 lives. He received only a formal reprimand with forced retirement and full pension. One would have thought that Waddle's weepy, obnoxious confession to Time magazine (April 23) proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that his conceit and negligence as a supervisor led directly to the accident. As an admirer and defender of the military, I must say that the Pentagon's inept response to the Greeneville incident is cringe-making. It's silly for conservatives to go on blaming Bill Clinton's sloppy stewardship for this recent string of military embarrassments. There's a new administration in charge.

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