Sometimes you just gotta laugh.

Hillary and Obama are tossing mud over which tyrants they’d meet with and when. Obama, pitching himself as a grown up, said he’d meet with any and all, whenever. Hillary pounced on his naivete and said she’d have to know the circumstances first.

Both are advancing the notion that Bush never practices diplomacy, preferring to sulk in his Oval Office if the world doesn’t do his bidding. Sample:

“The times are over when just talking tough or refusing to talk to folks is somehow an emblem of your toughness,” Obama continued.”

Bush has notched quite a few diplomatic victories, more than Bill Clinton by a long shot. Consider:

  • Convincing Libya’s nut-case Mohammar Khadafi to give up his nuclear program. This was done without a shot being fired, unless you count the example of Saddam’s downfall that encourged Khadafi to quit when the quitting was good.
  • Negotiated an end to the Sudanese civil war that had raged for decades and killed 1.9 million civilians. Remember the “Lost Boys of Sudan?” That was the war that was. The Bush administration efforts resulted in the 2005 peace agreement.
  • Negotiated a treaty with North Korea after refusing to meet one-on-one with Kim Jong-il, as John Kerry insisted he do. Instead, Bush worked with five other nations to put pressure on the regime. Time will tell if the deal holds, but for the moment it’s rather cheeky for Democrats to bitch about Bush being unilateral.
  • Bush won on Global Warming, though you don’t hear much about it. Such are the anti-capitalist sentiments among the Left who would destroy the US economy just to lower carbon emissions.

Bush played a smart hand:

From the early days of the Kyoto Protocol, one of the not-so-hidden agendas of the Europeans was to use climate-change agreements to hobble the American economy, so much so that even the Clinton administration felt compelled to push back.

…Bush has firmly rejected hard emissions caps and international tradable-emissions schemes (cap and trade). In his recent remarks, he emphasized that emerging nations such as China and India should be able to set their own emissions goals relative to their economic circumstances, and press above all for technology transfer.

Translation: Any realistic greenhouse-gas-emissions program will have to recognize that developing nations such as China and India must grow. This is true also of the U.S., whose economy continues to expand even as Europe stagnates. At least for the intermediate term, the emissions of such nations will grow too. By proposing to convene the Big 15 emitters under U.S. leadership, Bush threatens to eclipse the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which brought us Kyoto. Not bad for a day’s work.

Bush has a strong card to play. For the last several years he has been ridiculed for his emphasis on reducing “emissions intensity” — i.e., the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted per dollar of economic output — and for the United States’ voluntary emissions strategy to lower GHG intensity. Two weeks ago the Department of Energy released preliminary figures showing that U.S. GHG emissions declined by 1.3 percent in 2006 while the economy grew by 3.3. percent.

This is significant: It is the first time U.S. GHG emissions have fallen in a non-recessionary year. In most European nations, GHG emissions went up last year; in fact, the U.S. has improved its energy efficiency faster than Europe over the last six years. By the time Bush leaves office in 2009, U.S. GHG emissions will have risen only about half as much as they did during the Clinton years. China and India could accept a GHG-intensity goal, for it is in their economic interest to improve their energy efficiency in cost-effective ways.

Hillary, as Bill’s co-president, can count the resolution of the conflict in Ireland as a win. But how many died in Ireland’s “troubles” over the years? Nothing like 1.9 million. So, unless you’re a racist who figures Irish lives count more than Sudanese lives, the Sudan treaty is the greater triumph.

As for Israel-Palestinian conflict, Clinton nearly popped a gasket in the waning days of his presidency trying to strike a deal between the two sides. But he got played by Arafat, who was never serious.

Which lead to one of the most humiliating scenes in recent American diplomacy: our Secretary of State, Madeline Albright chasing (literally) Arafat to his car begging him to return to the negotiations. Imagine how that image strenghtened our standing in the mideast.

And they dare to call Bush an amateur. Cheeky, indeed.