This morning our president received the much-anticipated Baker report on Iraq and declared it interesting. “It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion,” he declared of the much-anticipated bipartisan group-think product called “The Way Forward”, which sounds more like a forgotten Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford vehicle than a serious peace plan but that could be because Bush isn’t serious about peace. “I’m a war president,” he has insisted since 9.11 and his remarks constitute such a classic don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you blow-off that it’s hard to imagine any of the gentlemen on the committee waiting by the phone.

Much has already been made in the press of how much (or little) GWB would make of the Baker proposal, given his Oedipal relationship to Dad and all the Realists (fightin’ words to neocons) who served him. If there is one central image of our president that sums up his foreign policy it may be that of him trying to open a ceremonial door after leaving a stage in China last year. He made a comic face, probably not unlike the one he would make when the keg ran dry back at Yale,

He still thinks there is a secret door out of Iraq and that if he turns the handle we can exit — gracefully, even. Unfortunately he thinks the door is the same one he came in through when he got this party started. (Not the Grand Old Party; he ground that one to a halt.) Drunk on the fruit of his own nectar — “Come on everybody! Try some democracy! I’m driving!” — he is starting to realize no one else wants to boogie with him and it’s making him surly. In the words of Joe Walsh, “It’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door.”

Maybe saying one picture sums up this failed administration is unfair — there are so many to choose from. Some people still like “Mission: Accomplished” while a minority dig the box-on-the-back debate picture. (When in doubt, blame the tailor.) I’m starting to warm to a mental image, one conjured by Donald Rumsfeld’s eleventh hour memo, in which he says the Iraqis have to “pull up their socks.”

Aren’t you glad he left before one of his subordinates had to inform him that the men in Iraq don’t wear socks?