I lived in a lot of different neighborhoods when I was a kid, and in a lot of different countries. The games were different, as were the rules for what was cool and what wasn’t, and there were language difficulties, even though the countries I lived in were all English-speaking. They don’t speak the same in London’s West End as they do in Brisbane, or Los Angeles.

But kids are kids, and the behavioral patterns and social/ecological niches were pretty much the same everywhere I lived. You had your brains, and your jocks, and your bullies, and your wimps. There was more to it then that, but those four genres of childhood were usually the easiest to spot, often within minutes. Even in the English preparatory school system where everyone wore uniforms and came from roughly the same social class, those types were easy to spot.

And a constant among all those places was the most irritating one of all, the wimp who wanted to be a bully. Other kids would tease him, and he would immediately burst into tears, and in a full rage, declare that he was going to tell, and his dad or big brother or some other protector, real or imagined, would come and make them all sorry they had made fun of him. Only rarely did such an authority figure turn up, and usually if that happened, everyone faded into the woodwork until the threat went away, whereupon everyone would emerge and pummel the wimp.

Most wimps learned to take a different tack in interpersonal relationships fairly quickly, but there was always the hopeless case who kept doing the same "I’m gonna TELL..." crap over and over. Usually, said kid came from a fairly privileged background, but still felt a need to establish and reinforce a sense of superiority, a sense of toughness, a sense of being in control

As a rule, the harder they tried, the lower in the pack they sank. I can imagine them all now, multimillionaire overachievers with no lives seething in constant passive-aggressive rages at a world that continually victimized them. Not pretty.

Watching George W this week, I found it easy to imagine that he was one of those types of kids. Kids would make fun of his haircut, or hide his bike, and he would threaten to have Jeb or Neil show up and beat them up on his behalf. (I can’t imagine him citing Pappy as a threat, since Pappy was pretty clearly a wimp in his own right.) It’s probably America’s loss that someone didn’t pound his ass flat for him along about the fifth grade.

It’s been remarked about how brittle, thin-skinned and vindictive Putsch is, and those are all characteristics you expect to see develop from the type outlined above. But his emotional and intellectual dysfunction really grew into sharp focus this week when he taunted the growing guerrilla movement in Iraq, telling them to "bring it on."

Even his most rabid supporters had to be sucking their cheeks in and wishing he hadn’t said that. Even if the sight of this unaccomplished punk trying to act like Bruce Willis in a skyscraper didn’t bring considerable ridicule, the tactical idiocy of taunting a foe that is engaged in guerrilla warfare against you is pretty much manifest.

Maybe he spent too much time admiring those pictures of himself in full regalia, strutting around clownishly on the Abraham Lincoln, and decided he really was a war hero. But more likely is that his frustration and fright over the situation in Iraq simply drove him into childhood behavior patterns. "If you aren’t nice to me, I’m gonna get my buddies in the army, and they’ll kick your asses!"

The image of this scarecrow of a President, cowering 8,000 miles behind his troops, sticking out his chest and trying to sound like a latter-day John Wayne is bad enough. The right wing spin machine will go into overdrive trying to pretend that he has a right to act like a war hero, and it’ll confuse the custardheads to their stage of indecisive dithering that leads to complaisant following.

What is far worse is that by issuing this absurd challenge, he has put the life of every soldier – hell, every WESTERNER – in Iraq at that much greater risk.

Taunting the enemy is never a good tactic in a war. It’s ok to trash talk in the NBA or pro wrestling, where nobody gets killed and everyone, win or lose, gets paid, but war is different.

The Japanese in World War II liked to taunt America, leaving notes on the bodies of US soldiers that read, "They died badly" or taking American corpses and hanging them on trees with their penises cut off and sewn to their lips.

Does anyone think for an instant that Japan gained any emotional or military advantage from taunting America? Did America say, "oh, those guys are really tough; maybe we should quit and go home"?

No, it just increased American determination to defeat Japan.

Putsch just increased Iraqi determination to drive us, the foreign invaders, out of their land.

Some rightwingers have tried defending Putsch’s trash-talk by saying he wanted the Iraqis to come out and fight like men. Try to imagine on this fourth of July what the colonists would have said had King George the III made that particular demand! There would have been much hilarity in the alehouses, and endless pamphlets explaining why George was a moron.

Putsch has never fought. In fact, Putsch has never held a real job, or done much of anything except be an unsuccessful governor of Texas, and an unsuccessful president of the United States. Putting him in a flight suit and giving him Harrison Ford dialogue does not make him a war hero. It just makes him a clown in a war costume who is putting American troops at risk for no purpose than to fire up the grunt-and-belch pro wrestling fans at home.

In the 24 hours since Putsch shot off his mouth, two Americans have died, and 18 more injured. Lost limbs, lost eyes, body bags and crying mothers? Oh, yeah, bring it on, dude! George is tough. He can handle your sacrifice.

While he raises $220 million to buy another term as glorious leader, and give his rich buddies the tax breaks he wouldn’t dream of sharing with the families of the people who are dying for him.