Disaster in America
What's there left to say about the great disappointment that's Bush's re-election (read Economist account)? That John Kerry wasn't macho enough ? That provincials always trump cosmopolitans ? That Americans in their resoluteness don't care about what the rest of the world think?

Bush won in the electoral college and took the popular vote as well by a margin of up to 3 million. As if this weren't enough, the leader of the Democrats in the US Senate, Sen. Tom Daschle, also had to lose to a Bush-backed and telegenic younger Republican. Aargh.

In a way, Bush's victory makes sense. In dangerous and insecure times, people don't like polite and intellectual leaders; they feel safer under the fold of a tough-talking simple-minded bully. Oh well, let's just console ourselves with the thought that even Richard Nixon enjoyed a landslide victory in a Vietnam War election. As some Democrats opine, this election was a good one to lose. With a declining US economy and continuing attrition in Iraq, Americans, it is claimed, would end up blaming the Republican Party big-time.

The Democrats must find 2008 presidentiables fast. As the American Prospect points out, it would also greatly help if the candidate can plausibly say Grace without feeling sanctimonious.

BTW, did you notice that while every other network with international pretensions was hyperventilating about the American elections, China's CCTV was imperturbably in regular programming, as if haughtily saying that whatever happens, the Middle Kingdom would remain the Middle Kingdom, undisturbed by the electoral happenings of a global power that has begun its terminal decline.