McGrath got there before me.

In colloquial usage, "Manicheanism" refers to a simple mindset which divides perceived reality into black-and white terms, and particularly the tendency to see people as either the good guys or the bad guys.

With due respect to Joe Offer's request that we should exercise some charity, I honestly don't think Bush is up to the job. When I watched his first press conference after he took up office, I had that uncomfortable, embarrassed feeling that you get when you're interviewing a candidate (for a job, at an oral exam or whatever), and after about one and a half questions you realise that they're hopelessly inadequate, so you try to rescue them from their awkward situation by asking them easier and easier questions to string out the interview long enough to avoid compounding the embarrassment. Then they can't even answer the easy questions and you begin to despair... I don't think I ever saw a US president get an easier ride, and he was still pathetic.

Bush's manicheanism is the new McCarthyism: the world is divided into good guys and terrorists (the latter being by defininition un-American). Sharon hasn't even had to exert himself to convince Bush that the Palestinians are the bad guys, since they murder people using suicide bombs rather than US-supplied F-16s, Apache helicopters and M-16s. He demands extradition of the murderers of the rather nasty individual whom, in a supremely cynical gesture, he had appointed Minister for Tourism. But I don't see him offering to extradite the numerous Israeli agents who have murdererd various Palestinian faction leaders and other enemies of Israel who have been killed without any judicial process, not even the kangaroo court which Arafat organised recently to placate Sharon.