Digby's blog had the following short transcript of an exchange on Fox News between Sean Hannity and John Bolton. It perfectly captures the mindset of conservatives in these troubled (for them) times.

HANNITY: The news today brings a clear foreign policy victory for the Bush administration. But will the press report it that way? Joining us now for analysis, former ambassador to the U.N. and a Fox News contributor, John Bolton. What do you think this means?

BOLTON: I think it’s actually a clear victory for North Korea. They gain enormous political legitimacy…In return, we get precious little. I think this is North Korea demonstrating again that they can out-negotiate the U.S. without raising a sweat.

HANNITY: Boy I tell you they’ve done it time and time again, and I’m sorta perplexed, Mr. Ambassador, to understand why we keep going back to the well knowing that they haven’t kept the agreements in the past. Whatever happened to Reagan’s “trust but verify”?

See, Bolton had to give Hannity a quick bitch-slap to get his story properly aligned. Hannity starts out calling it "a clear foreign policy victory," and complaining about why the liberal press won't report it that way. Whoops! Wrong message! After Bolton sets him straight, he does an instant pivot to become Bolton's sycophant, now all concerned about how the North Koreans just burned us again.

Bolton and the other neocons may have nothing but several big bags of poop to show for all of their grand plans and tough talk, but they're sure as hell not going to relinquish the rhetorical battlfield to any unmanly types who might suggest that diplomacy could ever work. But poor faithful lapdogs like Hannity are left twisting in the wind because, absent any actual principles to guide them, they sometimes can't figure out which master to obey. This movement is so confused that they could neither define nor identify success if it fell into their laps.