Skip to main content

Those who are not with us...

The US election has as they say over there "gotten" nasty.

While it may have been a joke to say that they only difference between a pitbill and a Hockey mom was the lipstick, I really don't understand why American pitbulls wear lipstick. The bare faced lies that Sarah Palin has been prepared to sell to the American public: that Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists" etc. either mark her out as a truly exceptionally stupid woman or they demonstrate a contempt for the American people that is, quite literally, an insult to their intelligence.

It is now hardly a surprise that the McCain campaign is going down with all hands.

In fact, and more accurately, it is the Republican party that is holed below the waterline.

Sen. McCain has a record of distinguished service. However even he -and still less the witless Gov. Palin- can not overcome the legacy of the Bush administration and its record of reckless arrogance. The strutting mock-Texan George "W" Bush tried to to force the world into his own limited understanding and he failed. He failed to understand that even when facing the depravity of Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, it is still necessary to explain and to form a coalition.

Leadership involves persuading and cajoling people into doing things they may not wish to do and following ones own line. America had such leadership- earned through the hard lessons of the Cold war. Under Bush, it has come close to losing it.

Barack Obama is a natural coalition builder- in his world, whoever is not actually against him, is for him. Bush, by contrast, has alienated even those who are the natural supporters of the United States.

As Palin shows- oh so clearly- that she has learned nothing form the failures of the worst President in American history, Barack Obama now looks not only like the victor by some margin, but also that his Presidency could contain the elements of the transformational leadership that the country needs in order to overcome the disaster of the last eight years.

As a long time friend of the United States, I certainly hope so, and that the freak show of Sarah Palin and her demented followers is relegated to the footnote in a tome of a very obscure political history of the Great Republic.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Cicero


A question. Why is the spread on Italian Bonds different from the German ones now they're all together in a Currency union? In theory they should now all be equal or does the market feel if it ever came to it the Bundesbank would "stand by" Italy in the way they did for us in 1992.


Lepidus
Newmania said…
the freak show of Sarah Palin and her demented followers ......

Whatever the result your claim to be a friend of the US clearly does not extend to a great many of its citizens and can you really listen to Obamaha and not smell fraud ?
I was only recently reading your friend Norman Baker plying the usual Labour lite line of anti Americanism by the way . Once again Cicero you are out of touch with your own Party which generally dislikes America ,Israel and adores Europe largely as a way of confronting America
Are you not concerned about the protectionism espoused by the one and the hints that America is about to abdicate its global reponsibilities?


Personally the long line of vaccuous celebs lined up behind Obamah is more than enough to put me off ...and there`s his gaseous grandiloquent pomposity...yuk.
Oh dear. Are we back to "If you dislike a government administration you must be anti that country"?

So all those Gordon Brown-hating blogs that I see - they are all anti-British, are they?
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch