I reviewed many blogs to see if I could find a pattern to those who were confused or upset with Bush's MO (see Giving Critics Enough Rope and Enough Rope Revisited). I found an unanticipated problem in categorizing the blogs. I found a lot of blogs that were unfamilar to me and their political leanings were not always clear. So I scratched the idea of seeing which types of people were confused by Bush's MO. Before deciding the search was a poor use of my time, I did find two conservative writers that seemed confused about how Bush operates (Peter Wood and Terry Eastland).

I also found some other writers who agreed with my perspective. Daniel Wiener and Steve Den Beste came to the same conclusion when analyzing President Bush's response to Saddam Hussein. When doing this exercise, I noticed Steve even used the same rope cliche. I am familiar with his site and it is entirely possible that I may have picked up this analogy from him without realizing it. At any rate, multiple people have analyzed different examples of President Bush and concluded that he has a pattern of being patient, letting his opponents stand on a limb, and then sawing it off. Time will tell if we are right or just imaging things.

One useful benefit of this search process - I found some interesting blogs. I've added them to my links for now. We'll see if they survive the test of time.