President Bush, we learned today, gave up up the mixed pleasures of the golf course in 2002 in order to be war president. The idea of being seen in a pleasant, pastoral, and even artistic setting while American parents learn that their sons have been killed was apparently embarrassing to the great leader.

Far better had he decided to forego war instead of golf, or at least, since some kind smack- down of the Taliban was necessary and inevitable, decided to forego stupid wars to bring Jeffersonian democracy to the Middle East. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a pretty strong correlation between presidential time spent on the golf course and superior chief executive judgment, a metric which would rightly rank Dwight Eisenhower first among post-war presidents.

There’s also a more complicated sociological point to be made here: that the WASP establishment which ran the country’s foreign policy rather decently in the years after World War II has been nudged from the central halls of power, and one is now more likely to find its scions working on their handicaps or plotting elaborate middle age man getaways to this historic courses of Scotland than clawing their way up the ranks of the foreign affairs intelligentsia.

This tidal retreat from public life hasn’t necessarily been a good thing. Better had it at least pulled George Bush and Dick Cheney out with it.