This isn’t a political journal—basically, when it comes to screeds about politics you can find about fifty blogs in my list o’blogs over there that can do it much, much better than I can (and I’m not talking about the ones listed under “The Right”).
But I draw your attention now to an editorial in The Guardian newspaper, a reaction to the recent State of the Union:
We know, of course, that the pomp of the state of the union address barely hides another reality: an economically divided, unequal and uncertain country, with a substantial anti-war movement of its own, and whose citizens remain sceptical about their president’s wider strategies. Despite warm words about helping the poor with a system of “mentors”, and a big chunk of money to fund research into hydrogen cars to help the environment, his old conservatism shone through, with calls for an end to abortion. When he spoke of bringing forward his massive tax cuts, it was notable that only half of Congress rose to applaud: stone-faced Democrats sat that one out.
and this:
For Bush, the world community at the UN is interesting; but not very interesting; and certainly not essential.
He is the only person in the world who can afford to think this way. He has the muscle that no one else comes near to possessing. His menaces and his stare are easily mocked, but they are also impressively scary. I would not have liked to have been an Iraqi general watching that speech. We caricature today’s America as a flabby, divided and sentimental empire, led by an idiot; but it is also, at moments, the warlike republic of old, with a self-certainty no other country has known for generations. Today the UN is the flag and theory of the world order: but America, like its Coke, is the real thing.
I haven’t read anything similar on the pages of American papers. In the political blogs, yes, but not by leading opinion makers.
For Tony Blair it’s very different. Britain has not yet been attacked in the same way; indeed many people here believe attacking Iraq makes terrorism at home more likely, not less. The anti-war chorus is growing ever louder, both outside and inside the Commons, where the prime minister’s insistence yesterday that British troops would only be committed to war by “our government, our House of Commons, our country” was met with roars of disbelief.
I would love to have a country where the reported leader was made to face some opposition instead of getting softballs lobbed at him. Where he couldn’t hide behind the weaselly non-answers of his Press Secretary. Where pundits could ask hard questions without being asked why they hate America so much.
Can you imagine our Congress reacting with roars of disbelief, rather than scripted applause?
Didn’t think so.
What do we have here ? a demagogue to the apathetic ? I Googled the text to avoid the applause, etc. Sickening it was.
I’m ashamed of the American government! My friends over here ask me what I think of the goings-on in the U.S. and that’s what I say. Those Bush handlers, the men behind the curtain who wield the power, are heartless products of the Cold War. They want to keep it ( or a reasonable facsimile of it) going on forever, while they take the taxpayers to the cleaners and turn the government into a servant of big business. Slavery’s coming back folks. The South has risen!
>Can you imagine our Congress reacting with
>roars of disbelief, rather than scripted
>applause?
With Americans? I imagine it’d be a lot like the Jerry Springer show.
Luckily, we don’t have the clique mentality of British politics, where the party is the most important, and the individuals are nothing. It gives you a sort of invisible feel, and no one outside the party membership is going to remember what you said.
With two parties compteting in such a large an area as the US, the focus is on the indivdual person. This results in strange things like Colin Powell being in the same party as Orrin Hatch. But it also means that people are held accountable for what they say, and so you’re not likely to hear anything exciting out of a politician’s mouth.
the world is going down down down