Considering the cover of this week's Time magazine, President Bush is in good company on the "cowboy" front. The media and the Democrats used all sorts of "cowboy" combinations to lampoon President Reagan and the conduct of his foreign policy -- from nuclear arms control and S.D.I. to Central America. Here are just a few examples I found doing a quick Nexis search of newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and abroad:
Trigger-happy cowboy
Dangerous cowboy
Quick-draw cowboy
Missile-toting cowboy
Space cowboys
Hollywood cowboy
Lone cowboy
Hip-shooting cowboy
Missile-riding cowboy
Rough-and-ready cowboy
Nuclear cowboy
Macho cowboy
Cowboy president
Cowboy diplomacy
Cowboy era
Cowboy days
In 1988, presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was particularly derisive of Reagan's America "wandering around the world like a lonesome cowboy." And his chief foreign policy advisor, Madeleine Albright, also remarked that a Dukakis administration would jettison Reagan's "lonesome cowboy" approach to the world. Some things never change.